The Challenge
New York International Children’s Film Festival is significant enough that Pixar works directly with them to premiere their films. It was the primary public-facing platform for that relationship. It had to be worthy of it.
Audiences here were genuinely complex. The site needed to simultaneously delight children and families discovering the festival for the first time and function as a serious institutional platform for donors, administrators, and filmmakers managing submissions, memberships, and ticketing. Most non-profit sites resolve this tension by picking one audience and hoping the other tolerates it. NYICFF could not afford that compromise.
The Process
I came in as a contractor, hired specifically because I brought branding thinking to web work rather than treating them as separate disciplines. That distinction mattered on a project where every design decision had to serve two audiences with fundamentally different needs and expectations.
Visual language was bold, energetic, and immediately inviting for families and children while the structural architecture underneath gave administrators and donors the serious, functional platform they needed for giving and event management. Every design decision was evaluated against both audiences at once. Does this create joy for a child? Does this build confidence for a donor?
The information architecture was built to support ticketing, membership, fundraising, and film submissions without any of those functions competing with the warmth the festival required at its surface.
The Outcome
The site launched ahead of the New York premiere of Pixar’s Coco. Tickets sold out. It held the full range of the organization’s identity: joyful enough to honor its audience and serious enough to support its mission as an institution that Pixar trusts with their most important releases.
Disciplines: Web Design and Development · Creative Direction · Non-Profit Platform Architecture · UX/UI · Ticketing and Membership Systems
