We built The Court Theatre an award-winning website to open alongside their new venue.
- Year
- 2025
- Scope
- Web Design, Development
- Built with
- WordPress, Advanced Custom Fields, Tessitura
- Live project
- courttheatre.org.nz
The brief
A new building deserved more than a new coat of paint.
After thirteen years in Addington, The Court Theatre was moving back into the central city. The website had to open with the venue, sell tickets from day one, and feel like it belonged to the building people were about to walk into.
That ruled out a reskin. We rebuilt the site around a new structure, a design system built from scratch, and a live connection to the box office.
Colour
The red was already in the room.
Walk into the Stewart Family Theatre and the first thing you see is 377 seats in deep red, wrapped around the stage on three levels. It runs through the building: the seating, the warm bronze of the exterior cladding, the glow off the timber in the foyer.
So the palette started there rather than on a screen. We sampled the seating and built the brand colour out of it, then drew the supporting tones from the materials around it. In the design file the variable is named Brand cherry red, and the shade that ships sits within a few percent of the colour in the room.
Cherry does the work the brand needs doing: primary buttons, calls to action, promo blocks, the active state on a filter. Headings stay near-black, so the red is never competing with the text for a reader's attention, only marking the things worth acting on.
- #AF4167Brand cherry red 300Light shade. Used sparingly
- #833041Brand cherry red 400The primary. Buttons and calls to action
- #662533Brand cherry red 500Dark shade. Hover states
“We are thrilled with how it looks and you have perfectly encapsulated the journey we are on with The Court Theatre's brand.”
