ArtPärdē

ArtPärdē is a San Francisco performing-arts non-profit with a house-party soul: dance, music, and theater in a curated salon where artists experiment and audiences come as they are. Eight-plus shows, seventy-plus local artists promoted, 501(c)(3) status earned in 2024. I built the brand identity and the website, and I still keep the site current when new shows land.

This is the smallest project in this portfolio. It stays in the slate because of the decision inside it.

The setup

Nonprofit status made it real: ArtPärdē needed a legitimate home on the web, with event promotion, ticketing, and donations. The constraints were the opposite of a funded product team. Volunteer-run. No engineering staff. Near-zero budget. Content that changes in bursts, right before a show, and then sits quiet for months.

The tempting path

Hand-code it. I build custom sites for a living; the one you are reading is hand-built down to its token system, and a performing-arts salon is exactly the kind of client that invites an expressive, bespoke build.

But a custom site would have been for me, not for them. Every future content change would route through a developer. Every dependency update would be a small unfunded liability. For an organization whose entire technical staff is whoever volunteers next, custom code is not craft, it is debt.

The decision

Pick boring, durable tooling, and spend the craft budget on the brand.

Webflow runs the site, so a new show is a content edit, not a code deployment. Ticketing and donations go through Zeffy, because it takes zero platform fees, and a non-profit this size feels every percentage point. Calendar and community live in Google Calendar and Instagram, where the audience already is. Nothing in the stack needs a maintainer to stay alive.

The brand carries the personality the tooling keeps plain: the ARTPÄRDĒ wordmark with its borrowed diacritics, a come-as-you-are voice, salon warmth instead of institutional polish. The site’s whole job is routing three audiences, create, contribute, connect, to a stage, a donation, or a volunteer form.

The mark went through the full grind: early concepts explored partly with image models, a typeface study across dozens of settings, then the final wordmark vectorized letter by letter. Machine breadth, human finish.

Where it landed

Two years on, the site is still the organization’s home, promoting its next show with the same bones it launched with. Updates take minutes. Nothing has needed rescuing.

The design engineering here was restraint. The right stack is the one the client can live with after you leave: sometimes that is a token pipeline shipped to production, and sometimes it is a site builder and a fee-free payment platform, chosen on purpose.