Creating a digital home for Leicester’s creative community
Website design & development for Canopy — a new creative industries hub bringing businesses, talent and ideas together in the heart of Leicester.
Canopy is a new creative industries hub situated on King Street in Leicester, created as a home for creative businesses and a destination for talent, academics, visitors and the wider public.
With workspace, a café and bar, exhibitions, events and opportunities for collaboration, Canopy needed a digital presence that could capture the energy of the new space while making it easy for people to discover what it has to offer.
Savage & Gray Design were commissioned to design and develop the Canopy website, working with some rather gorgeous branding created for the space and supplied by movingstudio.co.uk.
The challenge
Canopy isn’t simply a workspace. It is a place, a community and a programme of activity — bringing together creative businesses, freelancers, visitors, events, food and drink, exhibitions and opportunities to connect.
The website therefore needed to communicate much more than the practical details of renting a workspace.
It needed to convey the personality and ambition of Canopy, while giving different audiences a clear route to the information that mattered to them.
For a new destination, the website would also play an important role in building awareness and encouraging businesses and individuals to become part of the community.
Creating a digital destination
Our approach was to make the website feel like an extension of the physical Canopy experience.
Strong photography, confident typography and generous layouts give the site a contemporary, creative feel, while clear navigation makes it simple for visitors to explore the different sides of Canopy.
The site introduces visitors to:
Workspace
Information for creative businesses looking for an inspiring and well-equipped base in Leicester city centre.
Café & Bar
A dedicated destination for Canopy’s all-day restaurant, café and bar, serving seasonal food and providing a social space for the community.
Exhibitions & Events
A platform for the varied programme of talks, music, socials, exhibitions and workshops taking place at Canopy.
The Community
Introducing the people, businesses and creative activity that make Canopy more than simply a place to work.
Designing for different audiences
One of the key challenges was ensuring that the website worked for Canopy’s diverse audiences.
A potential tenant might be looking for information about workspace and how to register their interest.
A visitor might want to find out what’s happening at Canopy.
Someone discovering the project for the first time needs to understand what Canopy is and why it matters within seconds.
We therefore designed the experience around clear user journeys, giving each audience an obvious route into the content while maintaining a consistent visual experience throughout the site.
Bringing the Canopy experience online
Design director Tim Savage said
“Canopy describes itself as a “vibrant habitat where creativity thrives and talents converge” — an idea that informed the tone and visual direction of the digital experience. Rather than treating the website as a static entity, we created a platform that can evolve with the building and its community.
As Canopy’s programme develops, new events, activities, businesses and stories can be brought into the digital experience, helping the website remain a living representation of the space.
That flexibility is central to how Savage & Gray approach WordPress development: building websites that are powerful, accessible, scalable and easy for clients to manage.
A platform for a growing creative community
Canopy represents Leicester’s ongoing aim of making innovation and collaboration part of everyday life. The website needed to reflect that ambition.
The result is a contemporary digital platform that introduces Canopy, promotes its workspace and hospitality offer, supports its programme of events and provides a gateway into its growing creative community.
As new businesses move in, events take place and relationships develop, the website provides the platform to tell those stories and keep people connected.
A digital home for a new creative community.
Client: Canopy / Leicester City Council
Location: Leicester
Sector: Creative Industries · Workspace · Culture
