U.P. Lions Serve

Overview

Upper Peninsula (U.P.) Lions Serve is a branch of the District 10 Lions Club that services the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Lions Chris Smith (Chairwoman of the Childhood Cancer Program) and Gary Perala (Chairman of the Defense Against Diabetes Program) saught to create a more user-friendly portal to advertise their programs and collect donations.

In May 2021, I was interviewed and brought in by their outgoing web developer. At the time, the Childhood Cancer Program portion of the website was the only available content to view. Since then, I have worked to design critical branding, develop and launch the Defense Against Diabetes portion of the website alongside the launch menu, migrate the server backend, and integrate the CC Program with Tour Da Yoop, Eh’s web presence.

Website Development

I contributed development effort towards the home page and CC sub-site, and built the DAD sub-site single-handedly. The majority of the design for the program sub-sites were done by the previous developer, Cole Robert Fisher.

The websites were built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Mine and Cole’s design work was done in Adobe Illustrator. As this work was some of my earliest while I was learning on the job, the implementation of the code is somewhat slow and heavy. If I get the chance, I’d like to go back in and make it more manageable.

Branding Design

One of my first jobs was to design a logo for the U.P. Lions Serve brand. after going through a smorgasbord of design ideas, we settled on a sleek wordmark emphasizing the “U.P.” and “Serve.” The logo now sees use across the websites and on physical collateral.

In early 2022, we began talks in bringing the District 10 Hunger Program under the U.P. Lions Serve umbrella. While its sub-site is still in development, the D10H imagery seen on the right serves as the official logo for the program.

Digital Backend

After Cole left the project, I became the de facto digital administrator for the online services U.P. Lions Serve utilizes. I oversee utilities from Google Workspace, their digital office, to Donorbox, their donation platform, along with Stripe and Paypal to act as payment processors.

After a surge in activity in December 2021, I migrated the site from Google Firebase to a more robust Digital Ocean server to keep up with the demand.