Creative Capital Grant Portal

Transforming the application process for a life-changing award

Client

Creative Capital

Timeline

2017–2018

Role

Lead Designer

Creative Capital has offered substantial financial and professional support for groundbreaking artists for almost twenty years. In 2018, their applications open up to a wider pool of creative fields and awards will be made more frequently. They approached Familiar for help with modernizing their application system and for help making their offering clearer and their process more transparent.

Apply Microsite

Recording of a user interacting with and scrolling down the Creative Capital apply microsite homepage

Desktop mockup of an artist detail from the hero space of the Creative Capital Apply microsite. This detail highlights Dohee Lee's Mago. — The hero space of the Apply microsite displays an array of artists who have received transformative Creative Capital grants. Each is expandable to a detail modal with more information about the funded project.

The Apply microsite is an opportunity for Creative Capital to clearly communicate the value of their awards, the range of artists they give the award to, and what it’s like to apply, collecting information that’s otherwise located in different sections of their main website.

Because the microsite will co-exist with the main Creative Capital site, we focus on enhancing their visual branding, doubling down on their expansive color palette and thoughtfully extending their limited typographic expression.

The Application

We design the application from the ground up to be focused on improving the process of applying, making it easy to progress through a rigorous form with multiple in-depth questions examining each applicants goals, practice, and relationship to the larger art world. By enabling each applicant to see the whole form at once, but encouraging them to answer each question one by one and allowing them to save their responses and come back later, we made what could be a daunting task more straightforward. We also made the whole thing responsive, so applicants can make progess on their application no matter what device they’re using.

Every applicant now has an account with personal information stored in the site's back-end, to make it easier to keep applicants up to date and allow them to review their past applications in the future.

All information associated with the application itself is stored in a custom-configured Salesforce database, allowing Creative Capital to access applicant data anywhere, to run reports on their applications, and helping to streamline the evaluation process.

Desktop mockup of summary view of Letter of Inquiry form from Creative Capital application, listing all prompts and questions, displaying which are required and associated word counts, with an indication of answer counts per section

The Familiar design team included Debra Ohayon and YY Lee.