Building a website

Mentee

Heather von Steinhagen

Cowessess First Nation

Whitehorse, YT

Mentor

Project Concept:

Building a website that authentically captures her work as an artist

Mentorship style:

Self-directed with key input from Marcos Castillo at Bizont

Heather von Steinhagen

Heather ‘Von' Steinhagen’s passion for supporting creative innovation and heart-filled connections drives her career and art practice. Homegrown from Whitehorse, Yukon, Heather is an artist of sorts with roots from Cowessess First Nation (mother, Cree) and Germany (father, 2nd generation Canadian). She exhibits her artwork regularly and is often working on challenging and creative projects such as co-curating TETHER, for the 2022 Arctic Arts Summit, and making artwork, reliable for twisting the mundane points of memory collected from all dimensions, with vibrant colour.

Why this project?

"I've always been, like, very curious about the online experience ever since dial up. My Mom actually reminded me how on Saturday mornings, she'd hear the, you know, that classic dial up noise in the morning.

It's like problem solving with creativity. Like you're really forced to use the specific materials that you have in front of you. I think it just really evolved because we're moving more and more into digital everything!

I would always ask my Mom, 'How can I do this or how can I do that?' And she would show me. So I think if I didn't have her in the beginning, I wouldn't be as interested because, you know, Google did not exist in the way that it exists now.

‍It’s really like this idea of kind of taking design control and even like data control of what exists online as well as having an intuitive and accessible resource, one single resource, as an artist so that I'm not like spending all of this money over all sorts of different platforms.

A lot of this is like a personal interest and just my natural keenness to find solutions and a lot of my world is online at the moment. And so yeah, just really diving deep into what does Indigenous design look like and what are the elements of Indigenous design? And I'm just so curious because it seems like an unlimited evolution of technology.

I think now I'm a bit more socially aware because it's a lot of power that we have given these people in tech. And like, how can I be a part of that? Not only as a woman or an Indigenous woman, but like someone living in Canada.”

Check out the gorgeous new site here: Heather Von Steinhagen !

Heather von Steinhagen

Mentee

Mentor

Core skills

Mapping out key elements and pages for a website
Experimenting with user experiences to create an engaging virtual experience
Visioning work on Indigenous design principles

Note: At the time of project was working with the platform Wix. Heather has since changed her platform to WordPress as Wix is an Israeli-owned company (re: the war on Gaza).

Why this project?

Heather von Steinhagen

Mentee

PROJECT EXCERPT

Learning Pathway

Heather spent significant time developing her creative vision for her site and determining how it could best serve her practice as an artist.
She explored web design platforms from the perspective of the user experience and spent time gathering inspirations for design and user interfaces. Heather drew on new media projects, game design platforms, as well as popular platforms like Pinterest and Instagram.
She looked into how data is stored on different platforms and choose one that aligns with her values.
Heather mapped out the core pages and elements for her site including: an about page, a portfolio, a blog, an online store, invoicing, a booking calendar and contact information. She explored how the user will transition between the pages (ex: a “read more” button).

She gathered the content for each page including high resolution photos of her artwork and descriptive text about her practice and priced out her artwork.
Heather used platform tutorials to create each page and transition.
To personalize her site even more, Heather designed her own font and digital drawings to use in her web design.
She spent time developing a routine for how she’ll maintain the site -- such as deciding how often she’ll write blog posts and where she’ll share them. Check out the gorgeous new site here: Heather Von Steinhagen !

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What’s the most important thing you learned?

“I think the best way to start is just to know who you are. That sounds really corny, but like really knowing like what you enjoy doing, and what you don't enjoy doing, and seeing how you can make those things easier in your digital work.” - Heather

What’s next?

“Having the information to understand IT design as an artist and as a nonprofit arts administrator has been so empowering.

A lot of NGOs don’t have alot of time for administrative tasks, especially web presence and getting that basic info out there. Hopefully the skills and knowledge that I'm learning can benefit some communities like that.

The fact that I can think beyond just the given tools that we have and beyond the companies that we know like Facebook and Google and think about a larger strategy is so important. I'm really thinking about a larger manifesto and now working with the Independent Media Arts Alliance on a project called interConnect.” - Heather

Tips, tricks and advice

Keep your site very simple and as natural and as intuitive as possible
Do your research about data ownership how/where it’s being stored
Browse your favourite sites for design inspiration and to see how they create their user interfaces
There are many grants and funding sources out there to support you. For example, I received funding to work on web design through the Yukon’s Historical and Museum’s Association Heritage Training Fund (Note: please see community directory for other local resources)