Academy of Scoring Arts: Helping them grow their creative community and attract more members

Helping the Academy of Scoring Arts attract new members through a bold visual identity, better content discovery, and a website designed around the value of belonging.

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The challenge

The Academy of Scoring Arts is a membership organisation for composers, arrangers, and orchestrators. It offers events, interviews, workshops, and an extensive library of educational videos for artists at every stage of their careers. Its previous website presented their content, but it didn’t confidently communicate why someone should join. Valuable content was difficult to discover, and the benefits of membership were easily overlooked. My challenge was to create a stronger identity for the Academy while making the value of membership obvious.

My approach

Creative organisations often assume their work should do all the talking. I don’t agree. The more creative your audience is, the higher their expectations are. Designers expect good design, musicians notice rhythm in layouts, and composers appreciate composition. That meant every design decision needed to reinforce the Academy of Scoring Arts’ credibility without making it feel exclusive.

Rather than relying on conventional full-width photographic banners, I used graphic elements to create a visual identity that reflects creativity, collaboration, and professionalism. Every page was designed to answer why people should I become members.

The solution

The finished Academy of Scoring Arts website combines an obvious typographic heirarchy, a systematic use of colour, and carefully constructed layouts to make the their growing collection of content easy to explore.

Behind the scenes, I explored dozens of banner concepts before arriving at the final direction. Early ideas drew inspiration from Erik Nitsche, Juan Gris, Kandinsky, and Miró before conversations with the client revealed that the Academy’s greatest strength was its community. My final graphics combined abstract forms with photography to illustrate the connections between members.

Behind the design

Every project begins long before I open a design app. For the Academy of Scoring Arts, I spent as much time exploring visual ideas as I did refining layouts. I researched album covers, modernist posters, and twentieth-century abstract art, testing dozens of banner concepts before discovering what truly resonated with the client.

Once that visual direction became clear, I developed the typography, grid, page layouts, and component system that made hundreds of articles, events, and videos easy to browse. The final design looks deceptively simple, but every element strengthens the Academy’s message and encourages new members to join.

The result

The new website presents the Academy of Scoring Arts as a confident, modern organisation that’s investing in its members. Clear messaging, strong typographic typography, improved content discovery, and deliberate calls to action help visitors understand the benefits of membership and make hundreds of educational resources easier to find.

What this project demonstrates

Creative organisations deserve creative websites. Too many rely on generic stock photography and out-of-the-box layouts. That’s why I believe that colour, graphics, layout and typography should all help tell the same story. That way, a website explains what an organisation does and makes people want to become part of it.