Skaneateles Historical Society Museum

Preserving History Through a Modern Brand & Digital Experience

Industry: Non-Profit
Scope: Brand Identity • Art Direction • Website Design • UX Strategy • Digital Marketing • Tourism Positioning

THE CHALLENGE

The Skaneateles Historical Society needed a contemporary visual and digital presence that could honor the community’s history while making its collections, exhibitions, and educational resources more accessible to modern audiences.

The creative challenge was to bridge historic authenticity with modern usability—creating an identity and website that felt established and credible without becoming visually dated or overly institutional.

Creative Direction

I developed a refreshed brand experience inspired by the character of Skaneateles and the architectural heritage of the Creamery Museum, translating historical references into a cleaner, more contemporary visual system.

This established a flexible foundation across the Society’s digital and promotional communications, balancing heritage, tourism, education, and community engagement.

Typography became a primary storytelling device within the brand. Typefaces were selected for their visual connections to 19th- and early-20th-century typographic traditions, creating an immediate sense of period and place. Serif forms, letter proportions, weight, and detailing reference the typography commonly associated with historical publications, signage, print ephemera, and editorial materials from those eras.

The result is a typographic system that invokes historical time periods without functioning as a literal period reproduction. Contemporary typography and spacing provide clarity and accessibility, while historically influenced type treatments establish an emotional connection to the Society’s past.

Managed by senior volunteers, the Skaneateles Historical Society suffered from a common problem in Non for Profits. No clear direction or style, and no one to take a leadership role.

This became a labor of love, as it melded two of my favorite things: Skaneateles, NY is my hometown. So, designing for them was something I was quite keen on. The second is my love for history, so this project allowed me to get some fun research done, as well as apply my design skills to the project as a whole.

Accessibility & Senior-Centered Experience

A key component of the creative direction was designing the digital experience around the needs of the Society’s senior and multigenerational audience. Because historical societies frequently serve older visitors, researchers, longtime residents, and community members, accessibility and ease of use were treated as strategic requirements from the beginning of the design process.

The website incorporated senior-friendly UX principles, including clear typographic hierarchy, generous spacing, strong content organization, intuitive navigation, readable text treatments, and straightforward calls to action. The visual system was intentionally designed to preserve the character of the historical brand while reducing unnecessary visual complexity and cognitive friction.

Supporting WCAG documentation and accessibility certification materials were incorporated into the project to provide documentation of the accessibility considerations applied to the digital experience and establish a stronger framework for ongoing compliance and maintenance.

The result was a website designed not only to preserve and communicate history, but to make that history more accessible to the people the Society serves—including older adults and visitors with varying levels of digital and physical accessibility.

Accessibility was treated as part of the brand experience—not a technical add-on. The objective was to ensure that the Society's historical narrative could be discovered, understood, and experienced by the widest possible audience.

Brand Style

The visual identity was designed as a flexible system capable of extending beyond the website into promotional materials, events, educational initiatives, fundraising communications, and community programming.

Events such as the Festival of Wreaths and the annual Boating Hall of Fame Gala provided opportunities to carry the brand into highly visible community experiences while maintaining a recognizable connection to the Society's broader identity.

Several additional logos were designed for various events throughout the year, giving a nice series of product drive event relationships to the overall brand scope and a harmonizing visual language.

This also included all the print materials for the museum, retractable banners, posters, the quarterly newsletter, business cards, and board of director stationery.

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Social Media & Historical Storytelling

To extend the Skaneateles Historical Society’s new visual identity beyond the website, a series of custom-designed social media posts was developed to create a consistent and recognizable presence across digital channels.

Each post was treated as an individual piece of visual storytelling rather than a templated promotional graphic. Historical photographs, archival information, event announcements, educational content, and community stories were brought together through a cohesive design system that incorporated the Society’s typography, period-inspired visual language, editorial hierarchy, and contemporary composition.

The design intentionally balanced historical authenticity with modern social-media communication. Typography referencing 19th- and early-20th-century print traditions helped establish a visual connection to the historical periods represented by the Society, while modern layouts, clear hierarchy, and accessible formatting ensured that content remained approachable for contemporary audiences.

75%

increase in viewership and interaction on Instagram

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Refreshing the Museum

Using a NYS grant award of over $400K, the historical society was able to leverage the money for a full refresh of the historical wing of the museum.

The newly designed exhibits brought the entire project full circle, as the brand style was able to show through, with a clear hierarchy of style, color, and voice both inside and out.

This included:

Exhibition design
Wayfinding
Video presentations
Event Management
Invitations
Social Media
Signage

KEY INSIGHTS

• Transformed a struggling nonprofit into a sophisticated museum organization within two years, contributing to a 75% increase in membership.

• Modernized the enterprise brand ecosystem across identity, website, advertising, exhibitions, signage, wayfinding, education, and communications.

• Built integrated fundraising programs across email, direct mail, social media, and print, generating engagement increases of up to 18.4% month over month.

• Prepared grant and funding proposals supporting organizational growth, capital improvements, and strategic priorities resulting in a $400K+ New York State Arts grant supporting refurbishment of the museum's historical wing.

• Led the implementation of AI-driven automation and digital marketing solutions to increase operational efficiency, optimize audience engagement, and scale creative production; built training frameworks, tutorials, and enablement resources that accelerated team adoption and expanded enterprise-wide tool utilization.

The Skaneateles Historical Society project demonstrated that preserving heritage does not require a brand to remain visually anchored in the past. By translating historical references into a contemporary design system—using period-inspired typography, accessible digital experiences, senior-centered UX, and custom social storytelling—the Society could honor its history while making it more approachable and discoverable for a broader, multigenerational audience.

The core creative insight was to treat accessibility, storytelling, and historical authenticity as interconnected design principles rather than separate project requirements. The result was a brand experience designed not simply to preserve the past, but to actively invite new audiences to engage with it.