WareHouse of Venice & Venice Drug-Free Youth
The WareHouse of Venice is dedicated to providing youth with drug-free programs, positive influences, and a supportive community. Although well renowned in Venice, Florida, the dynamic duo who lead the organization were limited by their clunky website and dark design style. They were missing out on grants “because the WareHouse website made awarders sad” and were wasting countless hours manually registering teens for events. It was time for a change.
The WareHouse of Venice team wasn’t quite ready to let go of their gritty logo design, but in good conscience we couldn’t let them continue using Comic Sans. So we cleaned up their primary logo for both the WareHouse of Venice and Venice Drug-Free Youth and made secondary badges the team could use on social media.
Debbie and Linda are passionate about their community in Venice, Florida and wanted the new brand to reflect the bright oranges, yellows and teals that you’ll see around businesses in the area.
“Lauren was the perfect person to add Heart and Spark to our refreshed brand and completely rebuilt website. She gets us. THANKS Lauren, for your patience, brilliance, and talent.”
Debbie Eaton & Linda Banister
President & Founder, the WareHouse of Venice, Inc.
The goal was to create a clear voice & tone that communicated what the WareHouse of Venice is all about—a safe space for Venice middle and high school students to go to connect, engage, and make good choices. It was important to keep the WareHouse of Venice’s voice & tone fun, fresh, positive, and upbeat so that the website would resonate and connect with Venice Area youth who want to make friends, find support, and stay drug-free.
We doubled down on playfulness in the WareHouse’s illustration library. To save on budget we purchased a set of illustration from Craftwork, then customized the set to fit the new WareHouse brand.
This collection of hand-drawn and rendered illustrations show snapshots of their programs and processes with human, quirky twists that blend old with new (registration on an old bubble computer, their old Ford Econoline van with “dealing with it,” events listed on a paper calendar).
The illustrations feel fun and unique to the WareHouse community. If you’re in on the joke you get it – but even if not, the illustrations will still help you feel like one of the crew.
HeartSpark implemented this new identity, centered in both quirkiness and functionality, into the visual design and interface of the WareHouse’s updated website. We updated photo treatments, added textured backgrounds, and streamlined the navigation so the website felt clean, fresh, and mostly importantly – fun!
We also worked with Diane Pauley to integrate strategic on-page SEO keywords and links so that the site would be found by families moving to the Venice, Florida area seeking out community for their teens.
Goals + Results
Modernized their donation process with Fundraise Up, resulting in 8 new donors in just 3 months.
After just 2 months, they experienced over 10X increase in unique website visitors, time-savings for their team, plus a whole lot of kudos and compliments from their community in Venice, Florida.
- Project Team
Lauren Atherton
Creative Direction
Diane Pauley
Copywriting
Megan Newell
Graphic Design
- Services
Brand Identity Refresh
Website Redesign (Squarespace)
- Focus Areas
Youth & Family
- Completed
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