Susie Seledon Web Design
Designed and shipped a website for a children's literacy fund in Gilroy, CA — coordinating four stakeholder groups through a three-day final deadline.
Shipped and in active iteration — I still support it as partner needs change.
Four stakeholder groups aligned on a single brand system and site structure.
Absorbed a late two-org scope expansion and still launched on deadline.
The Mission, the Audience, the Goals
The fund provides free books to families with children under 5 in Gilroy, CA. This fund created by Edward (Ed) Seledon is in memory of his late wife, Susie Seledon, a kindhearted kindergarten teacher. This fund had a mission, three partner organizations, but no brand, no site, and no copy.
Our goal was to build a website that consolidated all four stake holder groups: the Gilroy Foundation as the client, Ed as the donor honoring his late wife, the Santa Clara County Library District and Dolly Parton's Imagination Library.
How might we create a brand and site that honored Ed's personal vision while clearly serving the practical needs of three partner organizations?
A Brand From Zero
Since the fund had no existing visual identity, I started by gathering inspiration around warmth, childhood literacy, and approachable family-facing design. Explored three logo directions, paired with Seledon Blue and Seledon Yellow, Life Savers for display and Instrument Sans for body.
Three homepage directions went to stakeholders side by side — the fastest way to surface disagreement before high-fidelity work started.
Data Integrity Becoming a Design Decision
Ed wanted enrollment numbers compared across Gilroy, the county, and the country. When he later asked to compare Gilroy against individual county cities, I redesigned it as a pie chart but hit a problem that wasn't visual at all.
Gilroy's enrollment data updates monthly. County-wide data updates bi-annually. Charting them within the same pie chart would have implied both were equally current but Gilroy data would be ahead a couple months before the bi-annual updates.
I flagged it and discussed a workaround. The final design would distinguish two types of data visually instead of dropping the county comparison Ed wanted.
Gilroy's monthly figures sit in their own bar; the quarterly county comparison lives below with an "as of" date, so the two are never read as the same snapshot.
Shipping in Three Days
Deep into revisions, the library partners submitted new
asks: new copy, a Dolly Parton's Imagination Library (DPIL) page, a community literacy resources page, and
new logos across nearly every section. At the same time the launch date changed. Mattie, the boy who is
the face of the site, was moving away, and the site needed to be launched before he left. I set up a
meeting with stakeholders to consolidate needs and priorities, things that can be done post launch, and
things that needed to be completed before launch.
I made the call to fold the community literacy
content into the homepage instead of building it as a separate page, and to push the DPIL page to
post-launch so it could get a full, unrushed build.
Launched site — homepage scroll-through with the community literacy content folded in.
Extra Clarity
With feedback passing through three people before reaching me, I learned to ask more pointed, specific questions in every handoff rather than open-ended ones, since ambiguity compounds the more hands a message passes through.
Data integrity is design
A chart can be beautiful and still mislead. It's important to ensure the data behind the chart is accurate and properly represented.
Design for scope creep
Building flexible, modular page components from the start made it possible to absorb new logo placements and content sections without redesigning from scratch under a three-day deadline.
last updated august 2026