electric angel /design for life

run website [or adrian's secret life as a writer]

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

‘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!

god is a dj

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…?

a spirited design

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.

coastal studies

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…