The Well Endowed Podcast was created by the Edmonton Community Foundation (ECF) as a platform to share the stories the organization gets to be part of every day.
These monthly Podcast episodes feature stories from donors about what inspires their generosity, as well as tales from people who use ECF’s support to build and sustain social initiatives, empower youth, strengthen arts and culture, and more.
Client Goals
- To have a strong visual identity that would be easily recognizable amongst all the very many other Podcasts out there.
- To have a simple, easily-navigated website that makes it easy to open and share Podcast episodes.
- To have everything ready to go in under two weeks!
Visual Identity
Because the Podcast is cheekily named, we wanted to create a visual identity that had an air of sophistication to help represent what the Podcast was actually about — as opposed to the connotation such a name could inspire.
As initial ideas for the logo were sketched, it became apparent we were leaning in a more retro-radio direction for the visual style — vintage microphones, mid-century serifs, and brush script fonts all made an appearance. Because of the tight deadline on this project, we presented the logo concepts in colour (our first round of concepts are usually always presented in black and white), and the “TWEP initials forming a microphone” logo — presented in classy gold and black — was the winner. One round of revisions later, it was good to go!
The flexibility of the mark — being able to exist as an icon, a wordmark, or a combination of the two — is ideal, as it can easily be adapted to the different places it must live, namely the many different Podcast platforms out there. It also looks very fetching as a button!
Website Design & Development
Given the tight time constraints of this project and the simplicity the website required (as our early wireframes indicated), we decided the most efficient course of action was to take an existing WordPress template and manipulate it for TWEP’s use. This cut down on development time significantly and gave the client time to write and upload their content before the designated launch date. Careful design decisions were still made to ensure a strong user experience on all devices, with emphasis placed on providing obvious navigation to both individual episodes and the Podcast archive.
Limitations
Everyone was dealing with an extremely tight timeframe from start to launch. ECF wanted to launch the podcast when their Vital Signs report was announced, so the deadline could not be moved.
Reflections
If time had not been a limitation for this project, our preference would’ve been to develop a custom website to house the Podcasts, as this would’ve given us more creative leeway in terms of the UI.
When we went to the ECF office to present the logo concepts, we were greeted with an unexpected treat! The team had received the first three options for their podcast’s intro jingle from Jocelyn Ahlf and Thomas Brabec, and we got to listen to them together — all three were excellent and very different from each other. Being there to hear the jingle options really highlighted that we were working with a larger team that was all pulling together to do something very cool on a tight deadline.