website portfolio
New York Arab-American Comedy Festival
arabcomedy.org
 |
| Above: Homepage of the Comedy Festival website. The top image randomly rotates each time a visitor comes to the homepage, offering a selection of press clips about the Festival. |
The 3rd Annual New York Arab-American Comedy Festival (NYAACF) takes place on November 13th-17th 2005. The Festival was founded in 2003 by comedian Dean Obeidallah and comedienne and actress Maysoon Zayid to showcase the talents of Arab-American actors, comics, playwrights and filmmakers, and challenge as well as inspire their fellow Arab-Americans to create outstanding works of comedy. The website was redesigned and relaunched by nigelparry.net for the 3rd Annual Festival.
The design was created to be modern and vibrant, with a subtle Arab flavour. The Camel logo seen on the previous years' sites was given an amazing facelift by by Michael Kabbash of graphix4change.com. Good source images really helped out the design process as well. All the photos of the Theater Nights that appear as banner images in the various sections of the site, were taken by Memo Zack.
 |
| Above: Festival Performer Bios page of the festival. Artists sent their headshots in a mixture of B&W and color images. For consistency on this main page, all headshots were presented in B&W. If an artist submitted their headshot in color, the color version is available on the full bio page for that artist. |
Just how important a role the Festival Bios section of the website will serve became clear during development. Many of the particpants who the festival exists to promote did not previously have a bio and headshot on the Internet. In the age of Google, it is vital that anyone trying to promote their artistic career is discoverable on the Internet.
Of course, as a comedy site, there had to be something funky and funny. The standard E-mail This Page feature that appears on all nigelparry.net websites was given an interesting twist with the camel:
 |
| Above: The E-mail This Page function, allowing visitors to send the link to a page, with their comments, to a contact. |
The preponderance of "B"s is somewhat of an in-joke, in that there is no "P" sound in Arabic. As a result, Arabic native speakers often pronounce the letter P in words as B, hence "Bublic Relation." The E-mail News Announcement list was similarly customized.
 |
| Above: One of the informational pages in the About The Festival section. |
As the pages in the About The Festival section offer key festival information that is likely to be accessed by most visitors, and these pages represent 8 out of 13 of the visible navigation categories, there was a danger that the image that appears on every page in this section would become monotonous.
No problem! Using a cartoon theme, several versions of the same image were created with different speech/thought bubbles, to be randomly delivered as visitors browse pages. As the Festival draws near, there will be a caption competition for visitors to contribute their own captions, which will be worked into the rotation. The site continues to be developed.
 |
Above: One of a series of four posters created by nigelparry.net for the Festival.
Click here to view the series. |
The program cover and a series of 11"x17" posters were also created for the Festival by nigelparry.net. Coordinating print and web design through the same company is always a good idea to ensure maximum visual consistency.
Visit the website of the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival at arabcomedy.org.
| |
|
