The Center for Grieving Children
Bringing Hope & Love to Grieving Children
Hope & Love For Grieving Families
The Center for Grieving Children is a Portland, Maine-based organization dedicated to serving children, teens, families, and young adults who are experiencing grief. The Center provides peer support, outreach, and education to the more than 4,000 people they serve annually. Their space is warm and colorful, their staff is compassionate and dedicated, and their organization is one of the first of its kind in the country. They needed a website that properly reflected their passion, warmth, and groundbreaking work.
Designing a Family Feel
CGC is all about family. They serve thousands of families going through difficult times and the staff and volunteers want to provide a safe and warm atmosphere for all who visit. For a hero banner, we used images from a recent photo shoot they had with some of their member families - bright, joyful pictures that set the tone of the website.
Balancing a Serious Subject
Grief is a heavy subject, and CGC wants to respect that while still maintaining an optimistic and welcoming image. Because their primary focus is children and families, we used bright colors and small illustrations that add a flourish to the design and help balance out the serious subject matter.
A Place For Everyone
There’s a lot going on at the Center. Multiple group sessions for different ages and circumstances, a robust volunteer staff, a library of resources, fundraising events, and so much more. We needed to design a website that could organize all of the goings-on in an accessible and digestible way. In meetings with CGC’s Executive Director and Director of Philanthropy, Anne and Lisa, we worked together, going page by page and section by section, to create an information architecture that made sense.
What a joy it was to work with you all. What I thought would be an arduous project was to be eye-opening for me at the creative and on task efforts of your team. Our meetings were always fun. You all got it from the first steps the delicate balance our website was hoping to achieve ‘uplifting ‘ feel at a painful place in a child ‘s journey as part of a family dealing with loss and transition. Keeping Hope on the Horizon. My very best to all involved.
Anne Heros
Executive Director
The Center for Grieving Children
Support, Resilience, and Healing
With our architecture in place, our design and copywriting team got to work. Our copywriters crafted inspirational and on-brand messaging while polishing and slimming down the Center’s existing content to make it more concise and digestible. Our design team dipped into the Center’s plethora of images, complementing them with illustrated design flourishes. We kept CGC’s branded green color that we pulled from their existing logo and enhanced their palette by adding a bright, cheery purple into the mix. When all these elements come together, the CGC website becomes an inviting online spot, packed with information, resources, and warmth for grieving people in need.
