The Long Center Brand & Digital Transformation
The Long Center for the Performing Arts stands in the middle of Austin, offering the most diverse selection of live arts and events in the city. Over the past ten years they established themselves as the gathering place for classical arts lovers. But, their world is much broader than that and they were missing an opportunity to tell a bigger audience their bigger story. Based on our research, the Long Center is committed to bringing its community into everything they do. We helped tell their story with a rebrand and new mobile first website.
—The Ask
Design and develop a custom CMS that integrates with a third party ticketing system. Create a new brand and digital design system that is accessible. The design solution must be flexible enough to expand into all collateral materials.
— Our Goals
Come find your seat at the Long Center
For Austinites of every background, the Long Center is the community gathering place that offers the most diverse programming and stunning views of the city, so they can experience remarkable entertainment and live art together. With research and business goals in mind, we identified our project plan.
01. Empathize & Define
02. Develop Brand
03. Ideate & Design
04. Develop & Handoff
STEP .01
Empathize & Define
Activities: Qualitative Interviews, Location observations, Competitive audits, Client ideation workshop
The Long Center had existing consumer research to work off of but we went ahead and did some qualitative research.. We also collaborated with client stakeholders to refine and workshop the existing content and create new positioning statements, and brand values.
Our findings revealed:
The Long Center needs to be established as a “3rd place” for Austinites
STEP .02
Develop Brand
Activities: Create Manifesto, UI Elements, Photo Shoot, Community Type
We didn’t just need to establish a new look for the Long Center. We needed to create a brand that showed this palpable connection between theatre and audience and present it as an ever-present invitation to come and enjoy it.
— We looked to the view from the Long Center terrace for the color palette
— We looked to the architecture for the design system. The shapes of the lawn and arc are used for color blocks, imagery, and overlays. The pillars are represented in our copy structure with thin columns and full justification.
— We looked to real patrons enjoying real moments for imagery
— When it came to typography, we saw an opportunity to create something as meaningful as the people in the Long Center's story. We wanted to created a way to represent the community in every piece of collateral made for the brand.
STEP .03
Ideate & Design
Activities: Current Website Audit, User flows, Sitemap, Design
The Long Center’s old website had many issues that hindered our wide audiences ticket buying experience. Our designs needed to be mobile first, ADA compliant, have seamless integration with their ticketing system, and have an overall better UX experience. The look of the site also needed to convey the excitement of the new brand.
STEP .04
Develop & Handoff
Activities: Development, QA, Design System Training
Our development team created the website and then we had several hand-off sessions with the client to support their ability to edit, and revise the CMS and design templates. We left them with an exhaustive product backlog outlining the remaining features that would need to be accounted for in the experience.
Company: Archer Malmo
Date: 2017
My Role: Lead Visual/Product Designer
Team: Visual/Product Designer, Project Manager, Strategist, Creative Director, Developers