Jackie E. Smith Foundation Website Design and Development

Jacqueline E. Smith, known by her biological family and her extended church and community families as “Jackie,” incorporated the Lord’s will into everything she did. Her legacy lives on through her husband and children, whose creativity and drive to memorialize her resulted in the creation of a scholarship program.

Our creative team designed a cohesive, elegant website representative of every one of Jackie’s passions and favorite decorative elements. Over multiple webpages, we tastefully displayed Jackie’s legacy and the principles of her life, headed by a beautifully-framed portrait of the woman of honor herself.

Jackie E. Smith found joy and purpose in helping anyone in need, whether it be gifting a home-cooked meal or simply lending a prayer. She was born on September 4th, 1942, and spent most of her life in Tulsa, Oklahoma before returning home to His side on November 21, 2018. Jackie was survived by her husband of 55 years, Rod Smith, and her three beloved children.

Throughout her life, Jackie sought to brighten the lives of as many people as she could. She extended a helping hand to anyone in need, regardless of their age or affiliation. In the wake of her passing, Jackie’s surviving family members pursued a way to continue her legacy in a way that best embodied her drive for knowledge and charitable spirit.

They founded the Jackie E. Smith Scholarship Foundation in 2021 to benefit aspiring college graduates within the religious community of Tulsa. The newly-created foundation required a custom website design that would serve as the home base for the organization; a small space dedicated solely to Jackie and her compassionate heart. This single website would represent the incredible qualities and opportunities that Jackie stood for as a mother, wife, and child of God.

The website needed to be able to serve two purposes – as a memorial and as an opportunity. The objective of the foundation was to continue Jackie’s legacy by empowering students to achieve their goals through higher education. Recipients of her scholarship were upstanding members of society such as Jackie herself who maintained a 3.25 GPA or higher, and also attended a church or youth group and completed mission work within Tulsa. The branding of her website was incredibly important in ensuring the continuation of Jackie’s journey of service and faith.

When constructing this design, our creative team knew that effective communication was imperative in order to successfully represent Jackie’s life and legacy. Through every step of the web development process, we referenced information with the family to ensure that this milestone website embodied the same spirit, charisma, and faith as the foundation and Jackie herself. As a newly-established foundation, the scholarship program had no past recipients or history to document, leaving the bulk of the web design to the background information on the home page and the forms on the application page.

We strove to create a responsive design for the website home page that would catch the eye and draw attention to Jackie’s image and story. We incorporated the existing logo design for the foundation into the website home page, creating a vibrant teal background with a paper-like texture. This background serves as the top half of the homepage to accent the large, custom portrait of Jackie. This portrait is framed in the same gold color as the lettering of the logo, as well as the included passages from the Holy Bible, for a clean and cohesive look. Jackie’s favorite flower was a peony, so we included a beautiful image of a fresh, pink peony as well as a golden cross pendant into the portrait in her memory.

The bottom of the homepage serves as the true homage to Jackie, as it includes statements from her family regarding her life and legacy. Our goal was to communicate her message in a clear, compact manner without sacrificing the sentiment of the information. We used the same teal as the background for the text color in an easy-to-read, serif font, and flipped the background color to white in order to accent the portrait and balance the page.

For the application page, our team was able to meld the existing web page design with the digital application form, creating an easy-to-use application within the website without unnecessary redirection. When embedding the application into the website, our largest hurdle of this design was converting a lengthy, thorough application into a clear, readable format without overwhelming the reader or the integrity of the website.