Marion Design Co. was awarded a $6,000 grant from the Community Foundation of Grant County to help them through the final phase in the creation of the new City of Marion website.
According Herb Vincent Peterson, co-Founder and chief design officer For Marion Design Co., the bulk of the project is developing a functioning website. He said the finished product “will have a lot of image power.” The website will not only inform users what Marion has to offer, but tell the stories that makes the city unique.
A year and a half in the making, the new website for the City of Marion will “act as a welcome mat,” Peterson said.
“This has been a project that has been our hearts work,” Peterson said. “There’s still so much that needs to be done though.”
The grant will help Marion Design Co. put the final pieces in place for a website that will be modern and sustainable, lending itself to updates and modifications for years to come.
The team plans on having the website finished by the end of fall.
Marion Design Co. is a creative studio and branch of Indiana Wesleyan University’s Division of Art + Design, and a collaborative project founded by IWU professors Wendy Puffer, Peterson and Luke Anspach.
Anspach said the project has done a great deal for him and the number of IWU students who have all helped with first creating the city’s new brand and logo and now its website.
“It’s been a tactile experience for students … So many have had a role in this project, some of them came in at the beginning and others came in at the end. I couldn’t even give you a number for how many volunteers have been part of this effort,” Anspach said. “But this project is a project for the city, and I think it has brought students who are in and out in four years closer to Marion. They feel like they’re really part of the community.”
Anspach said that a project of this scale and length function off of volunteerism is unheard of.
“The quality of website that we’re creating is something that people, companies, have paid much, much more for, and we’ve basically made it happen with volunteers. It’s amazing,” Anspach said.