Create the next website design for Fire Exit Theatre

Fire Exit Theatre

Fire Exit Theatre is a non-profit, faith-based theatre company in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Shows are written by a variety of playwrights and shown throughout Calgary and area.

http://www.fireexit.ca

We'd like a design that has some artistic feel to it, but is still easy to use and won't be difficult to massage to make it work with other future elements of the website.

Feel free to go off in different directions from the current site. There are things we have liked about the current site, but we have also thought about doing a cleaner site.

http://www.francescanini.com - A unique design, that has some elements that attract your attention, but still has "typical" navigation that allows you to quickly get to the content. We need a bit more content on the home page, but ideas and suggestions for small and clean animation that can be created using JavaScript are welcome. We are also willing to use AJAX and although it maybe part of a future revision.

http://www.pointlesscorp.com - Again we like the artist styling from the 60s/70s on this site. It also includes a bit of animation (the logo) to make things interesting. The colours are also simple, making the site distraction free and easy to find the content. Although, on the other hand it seems that our eyes don't focus on 1 element.

http://www.surrealsorealtheatre.com - we like the idea of the website and the fact that it's unique, but we're not sure if it'd all be possible without Flash. We also want a fast website, which unfortunately this isn't. The main reason for listing this one is it's unique and stands out from the crowd.

The main reason for the redesign is because the current website it out of date and uses Flash. There are additions we'd like to make that just aren't feasible in the setup.

The pages we need designed are the home page and a general, flexible content page.

The home page will have the poster for the next show, the date and possibly a short description (1-2 sentences). There will also be a news section, links to purchase tickets and donate along with a small piece about the theatre and contact information. It also might be an option to only include information about the next show right on the home page page.

The remainder of the pages will have a variety of content. The pages will be: new, about us, shows & tickets, gallery, friends & sponsors, links, and contact. The pages should be flexible enough that we can change their content easily over time. The best page to create as a secondary page is the shows & tickets page. The page will only include the section of a ticket (possibly in a hidden area) and the buy now link.

From the artistic director: I'd like to "lighten" up our site…both colour-wise and content/style-wise. I like to portray that we take what we do seriously but we don't take ourselves seriously.

The website should be fun, easy to use and navigate and flexible. It also needs to have some artist elements, but still appeal to to common person. We'd prefer to go for a lighter site than the current design.

The current site uses Flash, but we don't want to use Flash on the new website as we'd like people to be able to use the website on all mobile devices (although we don't need a design specifically for mobile devices).

I've attached a few logo versions, although none are very good quality or quality + colour. I'm working on getting a higher quality and transparent version (hopefully vector) and I'll post it when I get it.

We would like to create the website using the 1140px grid (http://cssgrid.net/), so you can design for 1140px, but it needs to have the ability to shrink. Meaning the design should have room to compress to 960 (for 1024x768 monitor). We are not worried about going larger than 1140, but it'd be helpful if it could grow.

Feel free to use stock images. We have an account with iStockphoto, which works best for us if you'd like us to purchase the images after.