we’ve been mentioning this for a while and it seems a long time since we took the above photos after a creative coast event, but FreeBayWiFi is now live and free to use on sandside and round the harbour. this is phase 1, there’s another aerial going in soon which will extend the zone.

if you’re not the type of person who gets excited about techy stuff [and to be honest, that’s us too really] what this means is that you can check your email, look at websites, even do your weekly shop online while sipping coffee on the seafront. it’s also anticipated that free wireless broadband will be useful for the fishing fleet and boats mooring in the marina. if you’re the cynical type and think that sounds like a bit of a far-fetched continental dream for the yorkshire coast, then think again - last week i was meeting to discuss a project in one of the seafront coffee shops and everyone else in there was using a laptop. there’s no hype around this one.

we were pleased to be invited to help FreeBayWiFi happen and window stickers (designed by us and featuring our logo design) are going up in seafront premises today. metal signs will be appearing over the next couple of weeks. you can check out the website we’ve produced for the project at www.freebaywifi.net

i’m being interviewed on yorkshire coast radio in the morning about the project. why not get down the harbour, get online and leave a message on the website.

from the archives… this is a report for bradford district council upon completion of a seven year regeneration project to revitalise several inner city areas of bradford. it was accompanied by a website, also produced by electric angel: www.newlandspartnership.co.uk

we started electric angel design within the newlands area and were grateful for a grant to help us buy software. the newlands funding was also instrumental in the genesis of artworks creative communities which whom we have a long standing and creatively rewarding relationship, so being invited to design the report and website seemed fitting. an event within the communities to celebrate the achievements of the project was used to launch the report and we were also commissioned to design exhibition stands and a rolling visual presentation.

one aspect of the brief for this job was getting the balance between professional and interesting design without it looking like it had costs a lot of money - that’s often the case in the public sector, it’s not about looking flash but looking presenting information in a readable interesting format and with integrity. so much thought was given to the colours used and the paper we printed onto. likewise, with the exhibition stands the intention was to produce something that would be of use for the various community groups and organisations afterwards - given the economic circumstances of the area it would have been insulting to have a showy event in which there was no benefit to the community. artworks planned the evening utilising local creative talent and the end result of both event and print got the balance just right.

…that’s the description for a website we produced towards the end of last year for launch at the national youthwork conference. the aim of the site is to provide a female voice and perspective in a male-dominated profession.

we were asked to design a logo, website and promo postcards for the newly-formed sophia network. the site was a collaboration with ross kendall using open source technology, hot on the heels of the renaissance friends site. there’s a lot going on in the website and ross did a sterling job to meet a rather tight deadline.

the site has two levels of engagement - casual visitors will see the public face which includes a blog, an editorial, events listing and a taste of the features on offer to members. when you sign in as a member there’s a more in-depth blog, an editorial written specifically for members, resources for download and directories of members and female speakers. this enables the site’s owners to tailor the content to two specific audiences as well as provide an incentive for females in youthwork to join up and benefit from being able to interact online in a safe space. the site is powered by a content management system so the owners have complete facilities to update content and manage the membership details.

for the logo design we did some research into ’sophia’ - the greek word for wisdom and in jewish scripture thought to represent the female part of god, something that reaches into the roman catholic tradition of referring to mary, the mother of christ as ’seat of divine wisdom’. we discovered that in the latin church sophia is usually pictured crowned and in the orthodox church with red skin. thus the crown features in the logo and the gold and red provided a starting point for the website’s colourscheme.

website to compliment the visual identity and promotional material we designed for west yorkshire community chaplaincy. the brief requested a simple design that gave priority to provision of information plus ease of use for wyccp staff who handle the updates. the site is driven by a content management system with training delivered on site at wyccp’s offices in leeds. visit it at www.wyccp.org.uk

the balance in our workload between design for print, websites and other creative stuff is always unpredictable. we’re currently busy with websites so i thought we ought to blog a few before there’s too much of a backlog. this is the website for mission network run - actually the first job we did for them, so it predates the print designs we’ve blogged about. we produced the design and html for a programmer at run to develop into a content managed site.

so to my secret life… run also invited me to write three articles a month for the sprint section of the website, a magazine section within the site. i review resources, offer a guide to what’s on the internet and surf contemporary culture for a series of ‘beginners guides’. the site launched in its new format over 2 years ago, so i’ve been making some of my living as a writer for a couple of years now - something i always forget to mention whenever people ask us what we do. in fact, there’s plenty of our writing in quite a lot of the design work we do and although we’ve never advertised that we do copywriting, people often see our stuff and ask us to write. alas, unless you’re a run member you can’t access to these particular articles but i’ll try and remember to post some examples of or links to our writing at some point.

‘renaissance friends’ launches today at the ‘looking back, stepping forward’ event in scarborough. it’s a yorkshire forward project aimed at supporting the renaissance programme in which towns in yorkshire are given opportunity to think afresh about architecture, urban space, culture and everything else that contributes to a vibrant place to live. renaissance friends are people who promise to support the process and the places they love.

we were commissioned to develop the logo, a website, produce sign-up postcards and credit card style membership cards with a unique membership number that compliment the site. friends also receive a metal pin badge. the website enables people to sign up, gradually building a database of friends. it’s driven by the drupal content management system. we invited ross kendall to join us on this project and he’s built the back end of the site while we handled the design. it’s been a pleasure to work with you ross!

you can visit the site at: www.renaissancefriends.org.uk - it’s worth a look to see some of the ideas and completed projects around the region. and if you love one of those places, become a friend!

today sees the launch of the new proost website at greenbelt festival. if you’re of a religious bent then we’d describe proost as being on the cutting edge of worship resources since 1997, if you’re not, then we’d describe proost as being an independent london-based record label catering to a niche audience. whichever, the proost posse are heroes and it’s been a pleasure to work for them.

the brief was to help relaunch proost on their tenth anniversary as they moved to the next stage in their evolution offering not just CD’s and books, but movies, mp3’s and pdf’s as downloads. they’re also on a mission to discover fresh creative talent with their ‘unusual suspects’ campaign and so there’s lots of stuff on there that no-one has seen before.

we invited gordon (aka scarborough-based sneakytrick) to work with us on this project and he should take credit for the clever stuff happening when you use the site. basically it’s an online shop with a slideshow as the main interface and a media player to preview audio and video. much of the content is available as physical products or downloads and there’s a cracking subscription offer that gives you access to all downloadable content for 12 months. it’s built in joomla! - an open source web application framework. we’ll blog more about the philosophy behind open source sometime soon, perhaps when we’ve shown you a few more sites we’ve been working on recently that were all built with similar technology.

i confess a vested interest here. a few years ago proost published a track i wrote on the cd ’spirit of the new’ and as a result it was also picked up by a publishers to go in a youthwork resource book/cd-rom. thanks jonny for spotting my badly produced original! so should you be interested you can log on at www.proost.co.uk and take a listen - it’s called ’spirit draw near’. and while you’re there why not take out a subscription…?

another of our websites is now online and looking good with the content added by steve at spirited exchanges. it’s driven by the etomite content management system - an open source system we’re using on several websites we’re currently developing, chosen for its ease of use and because it has the potential to be real good on accessibility.

many of our sites are designed to be handed over to the client to manage themselves at their request it so it’s always interesting to see how they develop. i like what spirited exchanges are saying and i’ll be checking the site regulalrly, not just to see how it’s going but to check up on stories and other resources.

about time we put some web stuff on here… we were asked to help the university of hull centre for coastal studies market their website beyond the usual university routes. part of the uniqueness of the centre is the studying environment where students and staff have a friendly and more personal approach to study - something that needed to be communicated better. there was also the recognition that ecology is a hot topic but attracting potential students to courses beyond the obvious subjects can be difficult.

so a unique domain name [http://www.coastal-studies.org] mirroring the university website enables them to steer more visitors from search engines. we also did some work on the webpages themselves, creating more user-friendly navigation and communicating the feel of the courses by taking a more visual approach using photos from field trips. keep your eyes peeled for a name change and new logo for the centre in the near future…