The Fuller Lecture Series
The Fuller Lectures Series is an amazing community-level backyard summer lectures series organized and curated by Bethany Riordan-Butterworth and Ella Fitzgerald in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Starting in 2009, the Fuller Lectures have grown from a quiet backyard event to become recognized as a pivotal platform for the community to connect, share and relate. As the Fuller Lectures grows, the backyard feels smaller and smaller, and people spill into the streets to hear the lectures.
As the Center for Art Tapes’ 2012 Curators in Residence, The Fuller Lecture Series had support to take the event to the next level, organizing it’s first lectures outside of Halifax to reach other communities, and to commission a website to archive and make available documentation from past lectures. The site I built is my most responsive yet, and it really had to be. The Fuller Lectures Series organizers are busy arranging the Lectures, and that leaves little time to spend managing the website.
The site has two main purposes: act as a poster for upcoming lectures in the Current Season, and provide an Archive space for the wealth of fantastic content from previous lectures. This means that when a lecture is created, the system knows exactly where it should be placed- whether it’s in the Current Season or if it’s to be classified in the Archives. Once the Current Season is completed, the system knows, and lectures are automatically archived. Each lecture has multiple speakers with bio text and a profile picture, which is looped into the Users functionality of WordPress, allowing for a database of Series contributors- everything in one spot. When audio or video documentation is available, it is dynamically attached to the speaker and will appear on the site. Since documentation can be long, expand/collapse functionality has been incorporated to control what content to show. As a user chooses content that they are interested in, the site keeps a reference, expanding relevant content and collapsing other. There’s also a fully functional Archive Search, making it super easy to find what you are looking for, a specific speaker, a topic, or just browsing.
From a design perspective, the site is inviting, approachable, and vibrant, reflecting the sentiments of The Fuller Lecture Series itself. Go spend some time on the site. There’s a lot of great content available!