Case Study

Joy Engine

A Milwaukee based nonprofit public art organization curating intentional, immersive art experiences

Joy Engine is Milwaukee’s premier nonprofit public art organization curating intentional, immersive art experiences to connect, uplift, and inspire the community.

Joy Engine, formally Black Box Fund, was created after more than 20 years of supporting Milwaukee’s arts & culture scene through MOD GEN, a retail business in the heart of Milwaukee. Co-founders Deb Kern and Doug McDonald saw their community support growing and taking on a life of its own. 

Graphic Brother Marketing was approached to design and develop a new website experience after they did a full rebrand and wanted their website to match the new brand guidelines.

Based on our initial conversations with Joy Engine, we knew WordPress, GiveWP, and Elementor were the right tools to build the new web experience. 

The main pain-point of this client was capturing the unique feel of each event. As an art experience company, each event has a unique artistic expression so they wanted each Experience page to represent each event’s uniqueness. 

The features requested were an on-site donation portal, a featured events/experiences section, and overall an updated UI and UX. The main purpose of this website is to highlight each experience uniquely and to allow people to find where, when, and what the current programming is. To achieve this we decided that past experiences and the current programming would have different feels to differentiate the timing. The past experiences have a half-page scroll feature with one side of the screen being a static image highlighting actual photos of the experience itself and the left side going into details about where, when, and how they achieved this fantastic event. This simple solution allowed each event to stand alone in feeling by featuring actual images from the event itself instead of over-designing the page. 

"I have worked with other web designers before and I'm happy to report that the process to launch our new site was seamless and comfortable the entire time with the Graphic Brother team. They are professional, knowledgeable, helpful, and probably even most importantly when building a site, they are patient! Their fees were extremely reasonable for the awesome service they provided, and we have received nothing but compliments about the site. We are full of joy! I would highly recommend Graphic Brother Marketing."
Steph Salvia
Executive Director

Since its launch, they’ve gotten fantastic feedback from the community and are more than happy to direct people to its website.  

We were happy to welcome Joy Engine to the Graphic Brother family and we look forward to continuing our relationship in the future. Graphic Brother Marketing will continue to provide marketing assistance and consultation for Joy Engine as they continue to serve their community. If you want to start a conversation get in touch below!