Artist at Risk Connexion

A project of PEN America, Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) safeguards the right to artistic freedom of expression and ensures that artists and cultural professionals everywhere can live and work without fear.

Since its inception in 2017, ARC has assisted over 900 individual artists and cultural professionals from over 45 countries by connecting them to a wide range of services, including emergency funds, legal assistance, temporary relocation programs, and fellowships.

ARC’s team approached us for a website redesign. Our primary objectives included:

→ challenging the structure and content hierarchy of the existing website which felt messy and failed to effectively showcase ARC's initiatives;

→ rethinking the main navigation and footer for desktop and mobile;

→ crafting a brand new home page and 3 new pages to articulate ARC’s areas of action.

We started with workshops with ARC’s team to lay out a clear structure for ARC’s activities and initiatives.

We then designed a new navigation, a new home page and 3 pages which had to:

→ appeal to a varied audience of artists a risk, foundations, donors and the broader art community;

→ provide a clear path for at-risk artists in urgent need of assistance;

→ clearly showcase ARC’s array of activities;

→ provide links to ARC’s social media.

Our work resulted in clean designs for desktop and mobile, maintaining fidelity to ARC's design standards and existing brand. We laid a robust foundation for the entire website and introduced new UI elements that can be easily reused across other pages.