Kobayashi Zeitguys was the agency behind the strategy, concept, visuals, key message writing and development of the new Toronto Public Library Foundation on the WordPress website development platform. The donor-centric and analytics-supported approach we crafted focuses on creating the most accessible, ergonomic and streamlined workflow to drive visitors to complete their donation transaction.
The design, imagery and content is impactful and deliberately works within the guidelines of the Toronto Public Library brand to ensure that visitors know they are giving to the Library, not some Foundation of which they had no prior knowledge.
User Experience
We built a “ front-end editor” that allows nontechnical administrators to assemble complete pages using “ fragments” of content that they can create using the standard WordPress website development tools. This enables administrators to quickly build layouts that are completely customized to the specific content of the individual page. At right, an administrator’s view; below, the public page.
Custom Illustration
With the major visual elements of the design being dominated by powerful full-colour photography, we felt that hand-illustrated accents could be effective highlight punctuation for key content and bring a softer, more approachable attitude to an otherwise serious and down-to-business look-and-feel.
These custom elements were all drawn in-house using a very modern workflow: the artist leveraged advanced drawing apps on an iPad using pressure-sensitive input devices that closely approach the feel of traditional pen-and-paper. Creating the drawings electronically enabled much faster prototyping and iteration, and immensely facilitated the conversion into resolution-independent vector line art that could be brought into the website and manipulated using conventional markup.
friendly illustrations used through the site as accents to highlight calls to action, hand-drawn by Tom Auger on an iPad.
“The Toronto Public Library Foundation is a very happy Zeitguys client. Zeitguys took our dated, static, cumbersome website and gave us a user-friendly, contemporary site that we’re very proud of.
The Zeitguys team made the process stress free. They always over-delivered, on time and on budget. It was a real pleasure working with Joseph and Tom; they listened to our objectives and then provided solutions that exceeded expectations.
The Zeitguys team also worked closely with our other partners and suppliers to ensure that our new website is integrated with our systems.
I’m very happy that we chose Zeitguys for this important project and strongly recommend Zeitguys for any company or organization needing web solutions.”
Karen Devine
Associate Director of Marketing and Communications
Toronto Public Library Foundation
November 2014