Mood Board

In order to embody The Grand Illusion Cinema’s status as “the oldest and weirdest theater in Seattle,” I chose images that are gritty, bold, arthouse, or have odd angles or interesting shapes that are just a bit “weird.” I wanted to allude to the look of old movie posters so I chose bold, graphic letterforms and halftones textures.

Style Board

The Grand Illusion Cinema’s seats and curtains have an old-world, bold red brocade pattern. I tweaked the red color of the seats slightly to create a dark moody maroon paired with deep yellow, orange and cream for the other colors. I chose a bold, condensed typeface for the headlines that is reminiscent of bold movie posters with a highly legible typeface for body copy.

Proto-Personas

Thinking about The Grand Illusion Cinema’s target demographic, I came up with three proto-personas. These personas informed my site’s architecture which focused on the three main actions a user would take on the site; look up movie times, buy a membership, or find out more about the cinema’s history.

Wireframes

In order to ensure that I was fulfilling all of The Grand Illusion Cinema’s business needs, I created wireframes for each page. When conducting user interviews, I found that there was a lot of confusion around the site organization, especially the page combining membership and ticketing information. I redesigned the site architecture and created new layouts for the calendar and movie detail pages, moving ticket information to appear near showtimes where users need it most.

Final Designs

One of the requests that The Grand Illusion Cinema made was to highlight movie posters as the main image for each show. I created a card motif with the posters that clearly show which movie pairs with which metadata, meeting their key goal. I included membership information on the homepage and placed a donation button in the footer of each page as well as on a newly-named “join and support” page to meet their requests and clarify information.