CLIENT
Sun Valley Forum
year
2026
role
Creative Direction, Full Build
The Sun Valley Forum convenes leaders across sectors — CEOs of environmental organizations, entrepreneurs in clean energy, media figures, investors — to work toward a better future for energy, food systems, and environmental restoration. The people who attend this forum are accustomed to well-designed things. A site that feels outdated or inconsistent doesn't just look bad — it creates a credibility gap before anyone reads a word. The Forum's previous site had grown organically on Squarespace over time, built piecemeal as needs arose. The result was a fragmented experience: inconsistent visual language, confusing navigation, and no clear way for attendees to understand the program or the event's identity at a glance. I rebuilt it from scratch — design, build, and CMS architecture — working solo in Framer.
Original homepage
New homepage
The visual language for the updated site needed to come directly from the location it was based in. The audience for the forum are folks who care about landscapes and ecosystems. I used large-scale nature photography, generous negative space, and editorial typography to create pages that feel like they open slowly, rather than load. Heavy scroll motion and scroll interactions reinforce that rhythm: content appears gradually and softly as you move through the page, giving the experience a quality of discovery rather than presentation. The typographic direction pairs a contemporary serif for editorial weight with a clean sans for navigation and functional text. The combination reads as serious without being institutional; appropriate for a forum that is rigorous in its work but not governmental in its effect.
The site runs on a CMS architecture built for longevity. Speaker profiles, session descriptions, and agenda content are all managed through structured content types with reusable modules — dynamic speaker cards, clickable speaker lists, session lightboxes, and interactive agenda navigation. The system was built to scale year over year without requiring a redesign, which matters for an annual event where content volume grows and the organizing team needs to update the site themselves. Every interaction on the site was defined in WixStudio and built by me directly. The scroll behavior, the image reveal transitions, the hover states on speaker cards — all of it was part of the design intent from the start, not added afterward. When the site is working well, the technology is invisible. What the visitor experiences is the landscape, the program, and the people — in that order.
Interactive Program Preview