Brooklyn Botanic Garden

A modern, responsive website design for the iconic Brooklyn landmark.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden is an urban botanic garden that connects people to the world of plants, fostering delight and curiosity while inspiring an appreciation and sense of stewardship of the environment. We partnered with their team to design and develop a new presence online to share information about the Garden and educational content, and delivered high-fidelity designs and front-end code to their development team to integrate into their Expression Engine theme.

what we did together

Web Design & Development

client industry

Nonprofit Organizations

Brooklyn Botanic Garden website screenshot

from the client "I’ve been on teams for multiple redesigns and this was definitely one of the best experiences that I’ve ever had. I’ve worked in the past with other design firms where the designers come in with a very clear idea of their aesthetic and their vision, which doesn’t always work well with the client’s needs. This was outstanding and refreshing in the sense that they came in very responsive to the client’s brand and aesthetic, and to the user experience. I had a great experience working with them."

Ruiyan Xu Assistant Director of Digital Media

The Challenge: Modify an existing brand for the web

The Brooklyn Botanic Garden came to us looking for a UX savvy partner to provide a fresh, modern redesign for their nonprofit web presence. It was vital that the partner work within existing brand guidelines to imagine an online experience that would effectively communicate the beauty and simplicity of one of Brooklyn’s most beloved sites. BBG was also seeking a partner who could turn their sites into clean, responsive code for use in their new Expression Engine theme.

The Solution: A clean, photo-first approach

It took but one single trip to the Garden to solidify that the focus of any redesign would have to be beautiful, serene photography. With that in mind, we worked within the existing BBG brand guidelines, using Kievit (their signature typeface) and several colors from their palette that we found translated well to the Web. When the visual designs were finalized, Studio Simpatico delivered clean, semantic, responsive front-end code. The result? A mobile-friendly, content and photo-rich site that effectively communicates the mission and beauty of the Garden … that loads instantly.

if you liked this project you might be interested to see the site we built for the Denver based, 126 year-old nonprofit organization The National Civic League