Edmonton Valley Zoo Website Redesign

In this unsolicited redesign project, I took the website for Edmonton's Valley Zoo and tried both to refresh its look, and to make its current features more engaging and accessible to users. The current Valley Zoo site is a subsite within the attractions section of the larger City of Edmonton website. In my audit of the current Zoo pages, I observed that very little attempt has been made to differentiate between municipal attractions by, for example, creating independent visual identities for each one. The city may have wanted to tie all attractions together under a larger City of Edmonton brand; however, there are missed opportunities to highlight the unique features of the zoo facilities, and to use its site as a tool for visitor education, in the same way that many other zoos use their web presences to further their mandates to teach the public about environmental conservation and protection of the natural world.

I took inspiration from the current zoo logo—which plays with the double "Os" in "zoo, imagining them as a pair of animal eyes"—to create visual branding emphasizing circles and organic shapes, and chose a primary-adjacent colour pallette and dynamic outline header font both intended to increase the appeal to children as a key audience for zoo content. I built up the educational component of the site first by creating an icon set to identify each category of animal found at the zoo "at-a-glance," then by stripping extraneous detail away from animal images to display them clearly against a plain white background. All content about specific animal types is graphically tied to the zoo map to orient visitors and draw the connection between online learning and real world experiences.

Compositions were created in Adobe PhotoShop using best practices for document setup and image resizing so that all necessary assets could be extracted from the file at a later date to code the site as designed.