Cedarwood Lodge

Event Space Responsive Website
UI Design | Branding | Responsive Web

Project Background

Cedarwood Lodge is a new event space opening to reservations in early 2021. To create the venue, my clients converted their log cabin home into an elegant space open to weddings, business events and private parties. My role was to develop their branding and build out their digital presence. The venue needed a comprehensive brand design and a responsive, modern website to facilitate reservations and promote the uniqueness of the space.

Building a Brand

Every great brand starts with a great logo, and the Cedarwood Lodge brand needed a good one. Working closely with my clients we created three goals for the final product:

Over the course of several meetings we moved from my client's initial ideas and sketches to a final, polished logo.

With a logo complete and ready for use, the challenge shifted to creating full branding that balanced the rustic, forest charm of the venue space with the elegance and quality of service guests can expect. I started researching competitors and other designers' work to create moodboards. Hours went into researching styles and patterns. Inspired, I used notes from the logo design process and developed a comprehensive style guide for the brand.

Creating a Website

With a brand guide now created, it was time to turn my focus to designing the website. To help my clients understand how I envisioned the site working, I created a handful of low-fidelity wireframes which we discussed over the phone. It was in these conversations that we decided on a major architectural feature of the site: splitting event details onto a different page from the event overview pages. This would allow us to use more screen space on venue photos to sell the experience and also have fine details readily accessible when guests want them.

To keep the site organized and to properly scope the amount of work necessary for the site, I created a site map. Having a working skeleton for the build helped guide where to spend most of my work time and encouraged template making for repetitive page layouts.

Applying the style guide to the wireframes was meticulous work and required many rounds of iteration. Eventually that work was condensed into a UI style kit and added to the style guide. From here I could finally create full page mockups.

The final homepage design. Textures and shadow were added to create a more vibrant interface, further boosting the appeal of the site.

An initial round of iterations introduced the navigational aid and event callouts, making the home page a more acrtive landing page.

My initial design of the home page.

Evolving the Design

The biggest challenge in designing the site was pushing the UI from good to great. At 90% the design was solid and consistent, but lacked small details that make for a lasting wow factor. Here are a few examples of subtle tweaks that really pushed the UI forward.

I used the logo tree image as a background and dropped the opacity of the vendor cards to give the page a softer, more interconnected feel.

The CTA bar was okay, but lacked real emotional appeal. To address this, I created a custom button, adding a feather and marbled background for a textured, lively look. The addition of texture both reduces the flatness of the design and connects it to the rich textures of the venue itself.