With Art Philadelphia

Today I'm featuring a site that's a little different from my previous selections, being a site that in no way was built by a single developer. The site is With Art Philadelphia, or withart.visitphilly.com, and was built in collaboration between award winning web design team Bluecadet and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corporation. The site was built in July of 2012 with several awards, and even gaining a slot in the New York Times just for being that sleek. This is nigh revolutionary when regarding government sites, even those for tourism (which this is) tend to use outdated templates that haven't graduated to CSS3. But this site has everything from modern selection techniques to a slider plugin and web based font.

The site uses a Helvetica inspired font called Pragmatica which opens up the space on the page and makes the site feel less overwhelming even with all its content. Beyond typography the light blue color scheme was the first thing that attracted me, but I had to take a moment in reflection to figure out why. Blue surrounded by white is utilized for the design of the branding, but then used inversely for everything else. It's also used in moderation, unlike any number of blogs and social media sites which seem to love their in-your-face dual tones. This is just the CSS though, and while the visual design is flawless, there is more to be discovered.

With Art is organized brilliantly, I would say one of the best, but it lacks an organic feeling navigation on their event pages. But what it does have is access to booking arrangements at the bottom of every page, a well integrated search, and a beautiful slider that serves as the primary navigation. But they also give the option of using a secondary or tertiary navigation further down on the page, or when accessed by a different means. Everything on the site is fully cross-browser compatible while remaining intuitive and interactive. Even the map has enough information and interactivity to keep you wowed. Altogether the site is gorgeous, and deserves your attention if you haven't given it already.