Culture Canvas Cafe
A local community cafe, art, gallery, and co-working space in South Chicago
Overview
Culture Canvas Cafe is a non-profit dedicated to cultivating entrepreneurship within their vibrant community opening in fall 2024. For this project we wanted to create a functional, dynamic, and beneficial website that will help them grow as a emerging business. I worked in a group of five along with the founder during a ten week class period to build the site using Wordpress.
Needs analysis
We met with our client every week, the first two weeks we spent getting information about the business and audience. Using that information we created a needs analysis which contained user personas and user stories.
As a graphic designer working from home, I need a creative and inspiring workspace outside my home. I want to supports black-owned businesses and attend events that resonate with my identity as a black artist. I'm longing for a third space where I can express my creativity, attend events that reflect who I am, and feel less isolated.
As a local artists, I want to display my work, meet other artists in the community, and grab a bite to eat. I hope that I can meet other artists to work with, support, learn from, and to further my career as a artist.
As an online college student who lives in a chaotic household I need a place where I can quietly study and express my creativity. To do this, I need easily accessible events and an area during the day that isn’t too busy. I don’t feel like I can truly express myself in my home environment. A safe-space with like minded people is exactly what I am looking for.
As a high school student, I need a third place that I can go to after school to relax, study, and showcase my art. I hope to be able to network and meet other peers who are also interested in art, but to do that I have to be aware of the events that are occurring at Culture Canvas Cafe.
As a retired art teacher, my days are no longer spent in the studios, sipping a coffee, and chatting with my students. I hope to get more days like that where I can teach students or lead workshops, but in order to that I need to be able to inquire about the opportunity.
As a local pastor I want to find a place other than church to host youth group events to get kids more involved in the community and church so that I can reach more of the community and keep more of the kids engaged and involved.
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Prototyping
For prototyping started off by creating a site map and then each of the teammates made a low-fidelity wireframe for a page of the website they were assigned.
Logo Design
I also decided to work on some logos for them as they did not have a set in stone logo they did have two simple ones they made that I drew inspiration from. Below you will find a two sheets one with different versions and iterations of logos I was working and one with the final logo the client decided on.
The Website
After designing logos and prototyping, we set up the WordPress site using Hostinger for hosting. We chose Hostinger for its cost-effective e-commerce options compared to others like WordPress.org and Bluehost. Our team split into two groups: one focused on building the website, and the other on preparing client documents. Both groups could give input and make changes across tasks. I led the website development team and created tutorial videos to guide the client on making site updates after we are gone.