Capital E

Capital E is Wellington’s centre for children’s creativity with kids’ theatre, digital workshops and immersive creative experiences for children of all ages.

Capital E ignites and fuels the creative spark in young people, so they can be confident, capable, creative citizens! What an awesome brand to work with, something that really enriches children’s lives.

Capital E came to us with plans to refresh their website. They wanted something fun and vibrant that was easy to use, easy to update and integrated with their ticketing system.

Integration with existing systems

One of the main goals for the website was to show their current events, which are managed using Patronbase their “art management” ticketing and point of sale system. We used the Patronbase API to connect with the new website so that Capital E are able to manage all of their events from Patronbase, and the information will automatically update on the website at certain intervals. The integration allows us to get all of the events that Capital E are managing through Patronbase and display the information in an engaging way.

Design planning

The Capital E team were looking for their new site to be vibrant and bold. Trying to verbally communicate how you imagine the website to look can be extremely difficult. A picture is worth a thousand words and mood boards are a great way to convey that picture. So we explored design and illustration options, and established a visual style so that everyone understood the vision and direction right from the start.

The next step was to plan out the wireframes that defined the hierarchy, structure, general UX and some UI ideas. It’s important to do a lot of initial design planning as this forms the basis for all of the work that comes after it.

Pushing accessibility boundaries

During the templating phase we explored the boundaries of coloured background and contrast accessibility, we allowed the pages to have their own colour theme if Capital E chose, but the colours needed to be dark enough to ensure strong legibility.

Having fun with fading images

The desktop version on the team page has tiles which if you hover over them their child portraits change to their adult counterparts! The mobile experience transforms the tiles into a horizontal slider format to make scrolling and scanning the page an easier task.