Tai Chi, Yoga & Meditation Company seeks Fun, Lively Design

Energy Arts (http://www.energyarts.com)

Energy Arts teaches tai chi, qigong, Tao Yoga, breathing and meditation from the Taoist tradition. Founder Bruce Frantzis has been teaching for 40 years and his company has taught over 20,000 students and has an instructor base of over 350. We are rebuilding the site in Drupal.

Our mission is to help people increase their health and well-being, helping them through moving exercise or meditation to find ways to deal with stress and the challenges of modern living.

For our new website build we want to look more mainstream, avoiding anything overtly Chinese in feel. The look should have:
- Have open space and lots of white with minimal borders within the site
- Clear areas for navigation
- Focus on details (slight corner rounds, fades, color blends)
- Menu bar is changing to focus on the areas that we teach...so font selection and look and feel of this is key element
- Light watery happy feel, will provide pictures recently taken in Maui
- Thumbnail icons should blend in with the site and support overall look and feel.

We have attached some basic mockup ideas created internally only to be used as guide for menu structuring - but open to fresh, creative ways to display the information.

If design is chosen we have subpages that need to be designed - we have included several subpages as examples of how a user would flow through the site.

We have three primary audiences:
1) Beginners looking to learn something new
2) Intermediate people looking to upgrade or add a practice to what they already know
3) People who are considering becoming one of our instructors

Within that we have several main topic areas
1) Tai chi, bagua and qigong - chinese energy exercises
2) Breathing and Meditaiton - more for relaxation, peace of mind and sprituality
3) Yoga - We teach a softer gentle form of yoga that is more about meditation rather than softer poses.

It should inspire those considering learning from us. It will have pictures of smiling people and encourage people to learn more.

Photoshop full resolution in multiple layer editable file. Not required but will consider how front page design can be applied to second page.

Designing for strict XHTML - so layout and fonts and colors should conform to best practices. We just want photoshop files in this phase and if designer can take to next step we are open to having them do phase 2.

Width of Site approx 1000 pixels (slightly less with borders)
Min screen fit 1024X768 and Max Screen fit up to 1600X 1200

Want a slightly narrower banner so that we have our boxes below ABOVE THE FOLD on most browers.

Picture rotator will have some text on the righthand side...Picture rotator can be separate or attached to email capture giveaway.

Menu system will have tabs and we have not decided on front page if the About tab will have the items expanded immediately or not...

We will give immediate feedback on what we like and don't like and work with designers who originate the idea.