The Gordon House
Website Redesign
As a designer for Sheepscot Creative, I worked with the Gordon House, the only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed property in Oregon, to redesign their website.
The challenge was to take their old clunky and slow site, which did not represent the architectural style of the house, and transform it into a website that told the story of the house and ushered visitors towards educational resources and site visit information.
The client didn't want a logo re-design, as they already had a logo, but among their web files I discovered a small illustration of the houses’s signature woodwork design (called fretwork) that I cleaned up turned into a logo mark that could be used in the top navigation bar, as the favicon, and on merchandise.
It was like an archaeological dig—finding an old web icon, dusting it off, and refurbishing it into a core part of the visual identity of the Gordon House website.
I designed and built the site in Squarespace, with additional custom CSS.
TEAM:
President: Dave Weich of Sheepscot Creative
Senior Account Director: Benna Gottfried of Sheepscot Creative
Part of the task of the website redesign was to create new educational pages that shared the history of the house and Frank Lloyd Wright’s place in architectural history.
The client possessed great deal of archival material, some digital and some print, and it was my role to sort through materials and select the pieces that were best usable on the website. I also conducted archival research into Frank Lloyd Wright’s work, sourcing images from public archives to flesh out the story of the architect’s greater historical and stylistic context.
The result is a series of tiled collages that illustrate the history of the Gordon House.
I greatly enjoy diving into archives, historic images, and art/architectural history, (especially related to Oregon), for the means of telling stories and increasing accessibility to historic or artistic information.
This project’s success is marked by an increase in visitors and public engagement with the historic home.
The Gordon House
Film Photography
As part of this project, I had the occasion to visit the Gordon House site in Silverton, Oregon, where I captured the house on black and white film. Several of these photos are used on the website. High resolution digital images of interior and exterior, including drone photography, were also captured by Sheepscot Creative’s team.