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Great news to hear that Cogapp recently picked up a BIMA award for the interactives produced for the Great North Museum. The category was ‘the best Offline: Kiosk, Installation or On-Site Application’. I lead the design and produced all the creative on the Medieval Case Study interactive (featured on my site) and assisted on the design of the Set Works Bench, an interactive guide to an extensive display of taxidermy animals.

Reported in the Cogapp blog here

Cogapp case study on the project here

Read up on Great North related Cogapp news stories here and here

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My Girl Friday ~ Identity and Website

A fifties inspired branding project for a client setting up a freelance PA service. Once the identity was formed, we created a simple site that they would be able to update and add new features to when necessary. As always, technical wizardry was provided by one of my trusted crew of hardworking geeks.

To view the full site please visit: www.mygirlfriday-pa.com

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Creative Nation ~ Website design

I was approached by this newly formed creative production agency and asked to design them a simple and quirky site.

I created large monochrome and red image backgrounds which expand to fill large monitors. The content sits in layered boxes on top. The idea behind the backgrounds was to give the site some visual richness at a stage while this fledgling business is still collating the first pieces for its portfolio. Each page has a background image relating to the content, the site can be easily refreshed by creating new images.

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The Jewish Museum Kid Zone ~ Part of the web design project i worked on with Cogapp for The Jewish Museum in New York. They needed imagery to support the families section, especially in the Kid Zone area. I created some roughly cut silhouettes of traditional Jewish objects and of childrens craft materials to add visual interest to this area of the site aimed at young children.

For more information please visit the Cogapp website.

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Tindersticks Gig Poster ~ Poster designed for Melting Vinyl in Brighton to promote a rare Tindersticks gig. The band all loved the poster, which was a thrill for me since i have been a huge fan for about fifteen years.

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SCIE E-Learning Interactives ~ The project was to produce 6 e-learning resources to help people working in care learn about dealing with Children of Prisoners and Challenging Behaviour in Children’s Residential Care Homes.

I was lead designer on this project and designed the immersive environments used in the final interactives. The environments i created were built up from stock and custom made imagery. The backgrounds and characters were designed to illustrate the content and help engage the workers using these tools who have varying levels of literacy.

I consulted with staff who worked in relevant care homes and with subject matter experts who were writing the content, then created environments that represented typical residential care homes, family homes, notice boards and table tops. Users are guided around these areas when using the learning tools and shown photographs, interactive diagrams in text books, video shown on tv screens and interactive filing cabinets! All intended to make the educational experience more engaging and fun.

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V&A Museum ~ The brief from the V&A was to produce a simple and elegant interactive in keeping with the V&A brand. I was lead designer on this project.

The museum had high resolution photos of all of the collection which were stunning, my main objective was to keep the pages as simple as possible to allow the jewellery to be the main focus. I worked from wireframes which were provided by the production department and arranged regular design reviews with the client and Cogapp’s Interactivity Specialist throughout the project.

The result is a beautiful and simple interactive, now on display in the V&A’s Jewellery Gallery.

http://www.cogapp.com/portfolio/html/VandA_Jewellery.html

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Westway Climbing Wall ~ A small microsite designed for Westway Development Trust. Lead designer.

This fast turnaround project was done whilst working with Cogap, the designs were built by Martin Edwards their in-house Front End Web Developer. http://www.cogapp.com/home/index.html

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Centre for Research & Development

University of Brighton ~ Faculty of Arts & Architecture

Project: Branding and web design for CRD, the department supporting research in the Faculty of Arts and Architecture at the University of Brighton. After leading a branding exercise with key figures in CRD and the University to ascertain CRD’s brand values and stakeholder goals, i worked with other members of the design team on a series of design approaches which were developed and refined with regular steering group reviews from CRD. Limitations of the brief were that the identity did not conflict or compete with the Universities existing branding.

Brand: The final approach focuses on the ‘R’ for research in CRD refreshing and changing across applications. A set of Rs from different fonts were selected, the fonts were selected for the place in design history that they reflect. There was such an amazing body of work to bring forward from the researchers practice at CRD that we decided to keep the colours of the identity simple, black and white, so as not to compete with the work. The deliverable at the end of the intensely paced branding stage was a styleguide for the new identity (pictured above).

Web site: The website stage of the project kicked off with user testing CRDs existing site with the clients observing. I then proceeded to implement the identity we created using wireframes provided by Cogapp’s production team. Leading this part of the project on design the process involved frequent review meetings with the client. The resulting designs were handed over to the technical team who developed the site in Plone. The site launched in November 2007.

Professor Jonathan Woodham, Director of CRD: “Working with Cogapp has been a highly beneficial experience. We learnt, through observation of user testing, just what was missing from our old research website and, working with the young and flexible Cogapp team, have been provided with an excellent, original and efficient design solution that signals the imaginative research ethos that we required.”

To read more about this project please visit:

http://www.cogapp.com/portfolio/html/CRD.html

http://artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/