Nancy King- Author Site

By Janet

Nancy King, an author and professor, came to Angulo Marketing seeking help to update her online presence and help publicize her memoir. For someone like Nancy, who has helped others find their voices throughout her career, and who believes wholeheartedly in the power of stories and telling them, we set out to design a website that would invite a visitor into Nancy’s world of stories and experiences in a way that felt authentic and intimate. 

Using the image that Nancy herself described from her childhood of being in a forest, in the safety and comfort of nature, turning on “the theater of her mind’s eye”, we laid out her homepage to mirror this experience and channel Nancy’s unique process of storytelling. The header image is that of a forest, a place where Nancy found sanctuary and inspiration. The image is dark around the edges but there is a sunlit focal point at a short distance, a metaphorical warm escape from obscurity and darkness. This image was tied into Nancy’s site with a color overlay, using one of her primary colors, a purple, which adds some mystery and is at the same time very soothing. Nancy’s color palette was derived from a collection of Nancy’s weavings. We looked at the photos of her weavings and chose the colors that almost seemed to announce themselves as Nancy’s colors. ​

Photos of Nancy's weavings, which inspired her color palette.

After drafting the homepage and establishing a “feel” for the whole website, the work to be done was to organize the remaining pages that would share more about Nancy’s work, her workshop services, and provide a space for her to share short stories and updates in a blog format. We ended up with 6 tabs: Home, About, Stories, Workshops, Weavings, and Contact. We chose to feature her work under the tab “Stories” to highlight that Nancy’s work goes beyond the more limited category of “books”. Under this tab, you can find an interactive catalog of Nancy’s published books as well as a page for her memoir, and two separate pages for her blogs, one for general updates, and another for her World Tales, short stories written and inspired by places around the globe.

The design process of the promotional page for her memoir Breaking the Silence was similar to that of the homepage: as Nancy’s memoir lays her vulnerability bare in this work, this page also had to portray what an intimate and vulnerable creation this work is. Maintaining the imagery of a forest stayed true to Nancy’s personal haven in storytelling and was also complimentary to her book’s cover design. On this page, we went beyond a synopsis and tried to evoke a feeling, much like a TV commercial would. Testimonials and reactions from readers were collected and featured on this page to convey the power of this book to bring out stories in the readers and invite them on a journey of self inquiry and healing.

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Working on Nancy's site was very special. It felt like being invited into her space to redecorate and move some things around with her vision and needs in mind.

Thank you, Nancy, for the warm welcome!

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