www.kennedy-warren.org

Project Summary: A simple, straight-forward website design for the Residents’ Association of a historic Art Deco style apartment building located in Washington, D.C., whose purpose is to provide the organization with an online community and posting forum for events and documents relevant to the activities of the building and its tenants, providing them with a much-needed means of interaction and communication.

Design: Creation of website design and logo using Dreamweaver, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. The website also uses a CSS-based navigation. The style and colors of the website were inspired by the architecture of the building, and the era in which it was built, which was the early 1930’s, during the Great Depression. The building has a strong “Aztec Art Deco” influence and is listed on the National Historic Register. The logo font, as well as the colors and graphic embellishments on the site reflect the various Art Deco architectural features found on the building. The logo font is in fact, an original Art Deco-style font called “Saltbush Caps” and is similar to the font used by the building owners in their documents, as well as an example of some of the many Art Deco fonts used during the early ’30’s.

Additionally, I created a history page on the site to illustrate the architecture of the building and its many unusual features, as well as to detail some of the history on the Art Deco Movement itself. This page has been recently updated with new photos and information. To read more about the history of the original Kennedy-Warren building and its new wing, you can visit the page at this url: http://www.kennedy-warren.org/historyof_thekw.html.

Blog: I set up a blog for our Association using WordPress, a popular, open-source PHP-based blogging software, and we are still in the process of learning how to use all of its features. (This is the first blog I have ever set up, so I also went out and bought the Visual QuickStart Guide, WordPress 2.0, which I have found very useful.)

The title of our blog is “The Deco-Dence” which of course is a title inspired by the Art Deco theme, but also serves as a subtle reference to some of the recent legal issues that the residents have been affected by, such as the actions of the building’s management and the city government, involving matters such as rent increases and tenants’ legal rights. The blog will be used as a discussion vehicle for some of these legal matters, as well as other resident concerns.