The towns of Black Diamond & Turner Valley created a collaborative committee to guide business initiatives in the area. To achieve their goals they have set out Project Marketing Priorities focused on business investment attraction and growth. The initial step was to create three elements; a digital joint community/investment profile, a business micro-website, and a Digital Main Street program. EN Creative was selected to complete all three and additional elements such as photography, video production, and digital cartography. In this project showcase, we are going to take a look at the website element.
We approached the website element of the project like we would any other. The difference here was a significant amount of time was spent in the prototyping stage as a style had to be established and signed off on. We focused on the user journeys and concluded that there were three primary user groups and they all were stages of a single user journey experiencing Black Diamond - Turner Valley for the first time. Discovering the area and then learning about moving to the area or investing in the community. This provided an easy to use framework for navigation; Discover, Live, Invest.
When creating the styling, we looked to the area and it’s unique features. The towns sit at the base of the foothills. If you look east, you see expansive plains, and west you see rolling hills and large mountains. The Sheep River joins the two communities so we utilized that as a symbol of unity. The result was three shapes; mountain, rolling hill, and river with rounded corners exemplify the well-roundedness of the area. The font used is a modern font with encouraging upward angles representing growth.
The website needed to serve a variety of different users and therefore proved challenging in creating user flows that worked together. The IEDC is a very new organization and thus didn’t have a solidified brand so establishing a design language through the website that could be replicated for print material was very important. With such a large amount of information to present, it was challenging to organize and simplify it for the user. The result is a breathtaking design that follows embedded user journeys.
The website was well received and is an encouraging sign of what’s to come for the two communities. The styling and color scheme worked well to give the IEDC its own identity and stand out among the other economic development websites in Western Canada.
