Crafting a new brand and website for a world-renowned art school
When Seattle glass artist Dale Chihuly first founded Pilchuck Glass School in 1971, it wasn’t much more than a tent in a field in the foothills of the Cascade mountains. Today, it’s one of the world’s preeminent art schools, known for freely mixing media like 3D-modeling, vitreography, performance and more in a forward-thinking collision of artistic traditions.
Pilchuck needed a website and brand identity that accurately reflected the innovative, creative and ambitious spirit of the school. Plus, they needed a web presence that worked better and harder to meet the needs of the brand, their students, their artists and their patrons. So that’s what we gave them, through a deeply collaborative process true to the Pilchuck spirit.
Pilchuck Glass School
The approach
We started with a field trip, to experience the Pilchuck magic firsthand. Surrounded by a 15,000-acre tree farm, the campus sits on a 55-acre site of grassy fields, evergreen forests, hiking trails, and streams and ponds. It’s the ideal backdrop for creativity, introspection and awe.
There, nestled among firs and cedars in the high foothills of Washington’s Cascade mountains, we embarked on a creative collaboration with Pilchuck and our partners at the design agency Shore. We were all awestruck by the school’s environment, its history, and the world and practice of glassblowing. So we got to work creating a brand and marketing website that could reflect and support the magic we found there in the woods.
Project highlights
- ❤️ Made in Webflow
- 🧩 Component design system
- ✨ Brand-centric design
- ➕ Seamless software integrations
- 📃 Tons of pages
- 🎭 Arts and culture
- 😇 Non-profit organization
The team at Gigantic has been a dream to work with. We came to them asking for a site that could do two things really well: 1. Offer our potential students a very searchable and visually compelling course catalog and make it easy, clear, and 2. compelling for potential donors to support the organization. Tim and the team at Gigantic very much understood the assignment and without skipping a beat, they got to work building out custom solutions for us. From the discovery process to the information architecture/user journey process to the actual design and development, the team knocked it out of the park at every milestone. We began this project with a very ambitious but non-negotiable timeline. It was a heavy lift, but Gigantic got the site across the finish line on time, and delivered everything we’d asked for and more. Above everything, the Gigantic team showed time and again how much they truly care about their clients and our success. I could not have asked for a better team of talented, intelligent and genuinely wonderful humans to do this work.
A beautiful, compelling new brand identity
Led by our partners at Shore, we helped introduce life, nature, artistry and vision to Pilchuck’s brand. A key element is the use of marigold as a brand color. It's recognizable, findable, energetic—in fact, it’s the color of stardust.
On the new brand website, custom photography helps capture the experience of being at Pilchuck, as well as its place in and perspective on the world. Interstitial vignettes and archival imagery speak to the school’s rich history, while the site’s design, navigation and functionality all point to the future.
A highly functional Webflow website
Like many organizations, Pilchuck’s website is expected to do a lot of heavy lifting: promote events, recruit future students, keep current students in the loop (and enrolled in their classes) all while celebrating the school’s legacy and, of course, raising awareness and encouraging donations.
Pilchuck needed a site that could keep up with these demands, provide intuitive navigation and showcase Pilchuck’s artistic values. They needed to improve searchability and visual appeal for their course catalog, and to improve donation functionality.
Gigantic created a system for navigation that allows growth for Pilchuck's programs, and allows students and donors to clearly navigate and explore.
We streamlined and constructed a simplified IA for a user experience that’s as smooth as glass. And because we know Pilchuck’s goals and ambitions are always evolving, we built a component design system in Webflow to fully empower the school’s marketing team, and ensure the brand site can adapt to their needs.
We infused the site with the new brand identity to highlight the school’s creativity, talent, and ambition. We redesigned the course catalog from scratch to make it easier to view, search and filter, adding in custom photography to bring course content to life.
Putting a spotlight on fundraising
In addition to Dale Chiluly, two patrons named Anne Gould Hauberg and John H. Hauberg helped found Pilchuck. And Pilchuck today wouldn’t exist without the support of benefactors. But the school needed to raise awareness and tap into a new generation of supporters. As part of the IA overhaul, we put a spotlight on fundraising, making it easier than ever to donate to the school.
Seamless tool integrations
We integrated a number of tools in order to create a seamless experience on Pilchuck’s marketing website, from niche platforms like Givebutter (for donations) and MaxGiving (for auctions), to blockbusters like Mailchimp and Google Analytics. We also helped Pilchuck evaluate tools that integrate with Blackbaud, their donor management system.
Results & Impact
Since the launch of the site, the Pilchuck Glass School has seen incredible results. They have received 38% more applications yoy. They've also seen a huge uptick in audience engagement with Average session duration increasing by nearly 1 minute.
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Working with Gigantic was inspiring and impactful. Given the nature and timeline of this project, our company needed a collaborative and nimble partner—not just one who lists those qualities as bullet points in a capabilities presentation, but a partner who actually exhibits them day in and day out. Gigantic worked with our team to create and implement design decisions in real-time and, like any true partner, asked great questions and challenged us which has only benefited our company as a whole.
Working with Gigantic was inspiring and impactful. Given the nature and timeline of this project, our company needed a collaborative and nimble partner—not just one who lists those qualities as bullet points in a capabilities presentation, but a partner who actually exhibits them day in and day out. Gigantic worked with our team to create and implement design decisions in real-time and, like any true partner, asked great questions and challenged us which has only benefited our company as a whole.