I’ve been working with Mary Kurek for a few years now. She is an altruistic entrepreneur who did phenomenal work getting protective wear and medical technology to the people who needed it at the start of Covid 19. I’m very proud to be her website designer.
This most recent update to her website Frontrunners Innovate was a whopper. She wanted to consolidate two sites into one so there was a fair bit of importing and restructuring to do.
I teach my clients how to do my job
Mary was able to do most of the restructuring herself, asking me the occasional technical question which I could answer with screenshots. I love this way of working. The client saves time looking stuff up and they can refer back to screenshots of the back end of their actual site if they need a reminder. It is a properly tailored approach to teaching and collaboration and the end result is a client confident in their skills.
Changes to the navigation
My clients know what they do and sometimes my job is to get that knowledge out, so that everyone else can find it more easily. I offer a fresh viewpoint and my years of experience designing websites help to get the most important information seen first. I talked to Mary about the key elements of her work at Frontrunners Innovate and decided that we needed to make three things really clear to her readers. Using graphics from the merged site I created a menu to signpost readers to 3 key areas: Visibility, Consulting and Membership. I used colours to help people navigate and each section now has clear calls to direction, so readers know where to look for the information they need.
Clarifying the message
The original logo for Frontrunners worked well but it had an Adobe stock image in it. This meant that Mary could not guarantee that someone else was using her branding.
This was the original Frontrunners logo that was in existence before I started to work with Mary.
Mary liked the face but I struggled to design a face that represented everyone without making it look too cartoony, so we decided to remove it and cleaned up the whole logo while retaining the original font. The font choice for ‘Innovate’ has background lines that suggest both a chart and a network, this works well for Mary’s remit which is to connect innovators so they can have a greater impact.
Collaborative, human centered design
The end result is a website that communicates what Frontrunners Innovate does as a whole while giving space to individuals for showcases.
I’m sure this will develop further because Mary is constantly adapting and thinking of new ways to reach people.
You can visit Frontrunners Innovate at www.frontrunnersinnovate.com
