The 11 Day Power Play was an 11-day hockey game dedicated to raising $1 million dollars to fund cancer research for Roswell Park Cancer Institute. I had the opportunity to be a part of the strategy, design & development of a new website to promote the event.

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The 11 Day Power Play was an event dedicated to raising $1 million dollars to fund cancer research. I had the opportunity to design a website & create illustrations to promote the event.

client

Roswell Cancer Research Institute

credits

Heather Henry
– Senior Project Manager

Josh Myers
– Art Director

Jon Dymock
– Illustrator, Lead Designer, Developer (wordpress)

Karen ‘Swifty’ Jones
– Copywriting

client

Roswell Cancer Research Institute

credits

Heather Henry
– Senior Project Manager

Josh Myers
– Art Director

Jon Dymock
– Illustrator, Lead Designer, Developer

Karen ‘Swifty’ Jones
– Copywriting

problem statement:

How can we leverage the design and development of a promotional website to reach the goal of raising one million dollars to fund cancer research?

audience groups

In order to successfully design a website to meet such an enormous goal, we had to adopt a human-centered design approach with design thinking methodologies. After meeting with client and internal stakeholders, we’d decided on four separate audience segments to focus our efforts on: (1) Individual player sponsors, (2) volunteer who give their time, (3) general donations to the cause and (4) corporate sponsorships.

content strategy

After researching and defining our target audience segments, we moved onto creating a strategy for any necessary content. This step included conducting audits of relevant websites, addressing all business and usability needs/goals, defining the information architecture and evolving a sitemap to move forward with.

iterating with sketches and wireframes

Once we were semi-confident with what content would be presented on the website, it was time to sketch ideas and iterate on those ideas until a solution was reached.

visual design & branding elements

Once the foundation was complete with detailed wireframes and a finalized prototype, we focused on the creation of the visual identity – the ‘look and feel’. To do this, we immersed ourselves in digital and analogue media – books, websites, signage, movie scenes, historical findings, etc. to find inspiration and scratch at the problem. The client loved the idea of gritty hand-created backgrounds using watercolors along with custom illustrations to market the event.

illustrations created for the website

To better promote the website and convey the mood of the hockey game, we decided to create custom illustrations to use as visuals instead of browsing stock photography sites.

Using illustrations allowed us to have complete control over how to portray the grueling 11-day hockey game while keeping on track to make the tight project deadline.

Each illustration was created using photoshop, a digital pen stylus and a variety of digital watercolor brushes. Originally each had a bright color scheme but we made the decision to change to black/white in order to let the copy read better on the webpage.