New York, NY 
Case Study: International Festival of Arts & Ideas
About International Festival of Arts & Ideas
Let’s be honest: The chance to work with the phrase “Arts & Ideas” is sufficient to send any graphic designer into full swoon. When we began working together in 2006, the International Festival of Arts & Ideas was entering its12th season. Though well-along in its mission to develop a broad, diverse audience to build New Haven’s cultural profile and urban economy, the Festival's expansive, world-class program was hampered by weak branding and a low-functioning website that was difficult to update.
Our initial task was to re-brand the organization. The dialogues that the Festival fosters among artists, academics and audiences drove our solution to the logo design, which in turn provided the foundation for the Festival brochure. Our brochure design delivered far more functionality than is typically deemed even possible with print, including, for instance, a re-vamp of the calendar spread to showcase start-and-end time relationships among events as a way to encourage buyers – perhaps even some New Yorkers – to plan an art-filled day and night or weekend in New Haven. In particular, the re-brand delivered welcome vitality to the Festival’s environmental graphics (stage banners, way-finding signage, lamppost flags and booth signage), and to their membership and development, by securing the organization’s image among those most committed to its long-term success.
Our focus the following year was the Festival’s website, a design process that resulted in, among several significant achievements, a coveted Adobe Site of the Day Award acknowledging the originality of DAISY, our customized neural net-style search engine. DAISY was developed to showcase the Festival’s 100+ events by capturing Artists, Genres and Themes on individual “petals” related to the user’s central word choice. We reworked the print calendar into an online version with the addition of Genre and Venue filters, data that also fed directly into an area on the home page we called “Right Now”, where time—and weather—sensitive announcements may be posted.
Flyleaf Creative encouraged the marketing team to communicate with their online community year-round by offering access to their growing library of promotional videos and performance footage, using e-blasts to promote new content, encourage participation in the site’s Blogfest and drive membership. Flyleaf Creative also created intelligible How-To guides that enable Festival employees to manage updates to the site with welcome independence.
The website has proven to be a powerful tool for the Festival, resulting in stronger ticket sales (despite the economic downturn, ticket purchases by the average Festival-goer rose 5 percent in 2009) and increased traffic both online and at Festival events. Visits to the site increased a full 20 percent in the first year, and the percentage of first-time visitors to New Haven has nearly doubled, with those visitors’ food and retail spending increasing by a whopping 15 percent.
Case Study: The Tow Foundation
About The Tow Foundation
The Tow Foundation is a passionate, highly effective family philanthropy supporting community nonprofits working with vulnerable populations and at-risk individuals. Flyleaf Creative recommended that the Foundation’s new website have a dual focus: to illuminate the real impact the Foundation’s support has on individual lives and the influence on public policy they intend through initiatives such as challenge grants and seed funding.
Working with the theme, “INvesting in Positive OUTcomes” (a platform introduced earlier in a successful print brochure by Fog Design),Flyleaf Creative developed a strong visual language communicative of the dignity and exuberance of the website's many first-person narratives. Perhaps the most engaging facet of the new site is the link to “OUTcome Stories” in three categories—Youth & Families, Society, and Public Systems—conceived to humanize and validate every aspect of the Foundation’s work. Special attention was paid to ensure that text and photos combine to be a mirror for potential grantees wondering whether to apply.
Because the site’s content has a relatively long shelf life, we made the site as technologically simple to update as it is lively to visit. Flyleaf Creative’s policy is to keep the needs and programming skills of our many different clients in mind.
In breaking the mold for charitable foundation web sites, towfoundation.org generates an exhilarating sense of enthusiasm, courage and achievement–so much so that the site earned a coveted Wilmer Shield Rich Award for Excellence in Communications from the esteemed Council on Foundations in 2009. Responses from peers, colleagues and grantees overwhelmingly affirm the site’s appeal and effectiveness: “A most wonderful journey!” “So colorful, so positive, so approachable!” “You send a powerful message about the impact that philanthropy can have on system-wide change.”
By taking the words of the Tow family mission statement to heart—“We feel it is our obligation to help others achieve success in their own lives, to alleviate pain and suffering, and to offer opportunities for joy”—we are proud to have delivered a site we hope raises the bar for philanthropic websites everywhere.
“It was a pleasure working with the creative team at Flyleaf Creative. The staff was extremely helpful in translating our successful print messaging into a format that works beautifully on the web. We continue to get positive feedback from visitors to our site who feel it is clear, functions well, and captures the essence of our work.”
Emily Tow Jackson
Executive Director
The Tow Foundation