Search Party: From a Placeholder Page to “Beyond My Wildest Dreams”

Search Party: From a Placeholder Page to Beyond My Wildest Dreams

Journal · Stolan Acres · By Steve and Nolan

Search Party is a month of free public art on a rooftop in Chattanooga, run by Understory. We built the site that carries it, at searchpartycha.com. Jules Downum, Understory’s founder, wrote back: “The site looks INCREDIBLE. Beyond my wildest dreams!”

What Search Party is

Understory is a Chattanooga studio that makes things happen in real places instead of just talking about them. Their October project is Search Party: a month of free public art and programming on a rooftop at CARTA Shuttle Park North, 211 Broad Street, running October 9 through November 7, 2026. One ticketed night, called The Call, opens it. Free programming carries the rest of the month.

We came into the project through a designer we already work with, as a favor for Understory. No invoice, no rate card. Understory needed a site that could hold an entire month of public art and get a stranger from “what is this” to a ticket in one visit, on a phone, fast.

Where it started

When we started, Search Party lived on a placeholder page inside Understory’s studio site. For something built to bring strangers to a place they’d never stood, a site has one job: get someone from “what is this” to a ticket and up to the roof.

What we built

Search Party got its own site, at its own address. We built the page people actually needed: a hero that says what this is in one look, the ticketed night and its button, the free month laid out as something you can tap through instead of scroll past, how to get to a rooftop most people have never been on, and the sponsors who made it possible.

The site opens on a drawing of the building itself, the one from Understory’s own poster, that carries you from the street up onto the roof as you scroll, before you ever reach the ticket button. Every night of the month sits on its own card, so a stranger can tap one date the same way they’d point at a poster pinned to a wall.

What waits on the roof stays off the page, on purpose. The reveal belongs to opening night.

What Jules said

Jules runs Understory. On September 21, in an email about something else entirely, she wrote: “The site looks INCREDIBLE. Beyond my wildest dreams!”

We didn’t ask for that line. When we asked the next day whether we could share it, she said yes. That’s most of this case study. Not a metric. A person seeing the thing she’d been carrying in her head finally exist somewhere real, and telling us before we asked.

Why this is the same work, every time

We didn’t start with a template or a page builder theme. We started with what Search Party already is: a poster brought to life, handmade, grown out of a question a university anthropology department asked Chattanooga about how it moves and where it feels connected. The site had to feel like that poster, not like a page with an event pasted onto it.

That’s identity work before it’s ever web design, whether the client is a food truck, a realtor, or a month of public art on a roof. We call the foundation pillar Brand Identity, the first of five in our BRICK method, and it is the one people skip because it feels slower than picking a font. The site is downstream of who Understory already is. It was never the starting point.

The sponsor row at the bottom of the page carries the organizations who made Search Party possible, named the way they asked to be named. We sit in that row too, small and quiet, because that’s where a studio that did the work belongs. Not a case study slide. A line in the credits, next to everyone else who showed up.

See Search Party, live, at searchpartycha.com ↗

If your own site is closer to a placeholder than a Search Party, the free Identity Debt Audit will tell you where the gap actually is, in about three minutes.

Questions from this one

Is Search Party a real client, or a demo?

Real. Search Party and Understory are a live client project in Chattanooga, not a concept or a demo. You can see it yourself, live, right now.

Did Stolan Acres get paid for this?

No. This was a free build, done as a favor through a designer we already work with, with no invoice and no rate card.

What exactly did you build?

Search Party’s own site, at searchpartycha.com: the event’s story, the ticketed night, the month’s calendar, how to get there, and the sponsors.

Can I see the site?

Yes, at searchpartycha.com. The event runs October 9 through November 7, 2026, at CARTA Shuttle Park North in Chattanooga.

What if my business isn’t an event?

The method doesn’t change. We start with what’s already true about you, not a template, whether you run a rooftop event, a coffee shop, or a solo practice.