Another week and another launch, this time it was the turn of Rubicon Dance. We were invited along to Rubicon on Friday to help them introduce everyone to the new brand and website. It was great to see various people from the industry supporting Rubicon and they venture on a new chapter to grow and become even more successful, we even got to see a few of their dancers perform
We have been working with Rubicon Dance. for over 2 years now, initially starting with developing the class brochure and other printed work to rebranding them and developing a new website.
Rubicon Dance provide classes for all, splitting between part-time and full-time courses. Rubicon Dance wanted to develop their brand and also their brand elements in line with moving to a more commercially viable model (relying less on arts funding). We developed a number of elements that could be used to bring new audiences to Rubicon.
The challenge with Rubicon was to move the brand feel of community to one that still caters for community and in the same breath it is professional and produces great dancers. With the quality of the teaching being second to none. We worked to develop this slightly more grown up brand and produced communications to reinforce the two areas that Rubicon inhabits.
You can view some of the work we have done for Rubicon Dance in our Case Study
Posted by Andrew Thomas
Earlier this year we helped Eco Design Centre develop an understanding of how they can share their data, convey confident communications about who they are and what they do as an organisation. Concluding with a number of 30 second ads made by the Eco Design Centre team, which was great because it really got the whole team thinking about who they are and what they do as an organisation.
Following on from the strategy project we have been working with the team over the last month or so to design and develop a new website that will allow them flexibility to explain their services, relationships with private, public and educational sectors and give them the tools to publish all that rich data online.
You can visit the website and find out more about Eco Design Centre at www.ecodesigncentre.org
Since January we have been working closely with Cardiff Business School and Cardiff University's Web Services Team to design and implement a content managed website for the school.
Cardiff Business School is ranked second in the United Kingdom for its leading research. With over 150 faculty members, the school educates over 2500 students each year from over 120 countries, so it was imperative that the website was produced to be as flexible as possible, but with simple navigation and a clear design.
Before we began working with the Business School, their exiting website was managed by a select few, through a large number of Dreamweaver templates. Which is great for smaller websites, but with a website of this size it could only be described as madness, giving us a headache just thinking of the complications.
With well over 5,000 pages of content we proposed to simplify the management of content using our old favourite: Drupal (an open source content management). After a comprehensive planning stage we were then able to produce a robust multilingual website that can be updated by multiple members of staff, allowing for the website to updated instantly and securely. The site has slowly launched over the last week and its already receiving great feedback from the school faculty.
Its going to be great to see the website develop overtime as the Business School staff take control. Visit their new website at http://business.cardiff.ac.uk
A few weeks ago Elin was working on the research phase of a branding project, an element of that research surrounded minimal, clinical and colourful website design. Being Hoffi's resident geek and having worked in interactive design for well over the last decade I've built up quite a repository of directories and sites which I visit to stay up-to-date and generally get excited by the latest trends and technology. I thought it would be a nice idea to publish some links here, not only for us, but also for our friends and customers to see what's current in digital brand communication.
Over the last few months we have been putting together a new website ready for today's public announcement of Wales' top 50 fastest growing companies. The Fastgrowth 50 recognises and awards those companies that show exceptional growth sustained over a period of time and after thirteen years of identifying the fastest growing firms in Wales, the unique initiative is firmly established as the list of business success that entrepreneurs across Wales aspire to.
Organiser Professor Dylan Jones Evans explains: "Every year, it is a constant remainder of the vast entrepreneurial potential that exists within the Welsh business sector, with growth performance by businesses that is as good as any to be found across the regions of the UK."
Hoffi's role was to inject life into the online presence of the Fastgrowth 50. Working closely with Dylan we developed a prominent chart based focus to the site, which showcases this years winners and features Avonwen Landry as Wales' number one fastest growing company for 2011. Additional features such as news publishing and profile management will come on board (for those on the list) over the coming weeks, allowing this year's fifty to take ownership of their listings, whilst being able to use the website for promotion throughout the year.
This years event was supported by Capita Law, Santander, Media Wales, Logicalis, Venture Wales, University of Wales, Sinclair Group and University of Wales, Newport.
Since December 2010 we have been working with Neil and Zoe; owners of The Grove, a luxury boutique hotel based in Narberth Pembrokshire.
They approached us to develop the Grove brand and enhance its positioning as a luxury hotel and restaurant based in Wales. The superb 16th century building had been restored to the finest specifications and is now a true indulgence, a great venue and already with several high profile hotel, food and wine awards.
We approached the brand through a series of refinements; making subtle changes to the typography, colour and treatment used throughout all of the Grove's brand communications. Over the last few weeks we have been putting the finishing touches to the Grove website, which launched on the 11th of June. Like the refinements made to the brand identity, the website was approached in a similar way; working through the previous content with a copywriter to achieve a consistent tone of voice, tweaking the interface to ensure that the design is centred to the user and functional across browsers and screen resolutions.
Visit the Grove's website www.thegrove-narberth.co.uk
Midnight struck, and all change for National Theatre Wales (NTW). The year two program was launched and with it a change in this years approach to the NTW website. This year there was a shift from that of a journey around Wales to more of an adventure or party. Indeed the homepage is ment to capture the idea of a surreal party that has elements of all the productions/elements of NTW throughout the second year. The image was created/directed by the guys at elfen and photographed by Phil Borman.
For us the homepage functions in a similar way to last years however with fewer streams coming in from the community site. The What's On pages however were the real investment in time for the revised website. It was clear that there was a need this year to develop the site to be able to cope with more than one thing going on at a time. Unlike the first year where it was basically a new event per month. The second year has a number of occasions where there are two or even three things going on at once, and unlike last year these events are not all in Wales.
We therefore decided to break the experience up into three key users:
User one - Browsing
User two - Looking for an experience or gift
User three - Looking for a certain production/event
From these three profiles it was clear that the users would want different ways to navigate and search the information. While the information is quite minimal at the moment the search will allow in the future to gain access to a rich stream of information that it is hoped will also provide experience and recommendations. It is still very keen on content but as the content grows for the site we hope the experience will and other new elements will be added when necessary.
We have a 10 week GO placement for a front-end website developer to work on the development of a Drupal theme for a large bilingual information resource. The developer will be required to hand-code both CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XHTML to W3C standards, whilst being efficient and competent to replicate designs already visualised in Photoshop. Knowledge of Photoshop and PHP would be useful but not essential as some training will be provided to aid understanding of the Drupal CMS system. The outcome from the placement will be a fully functioning bilingual information resource that complies to the Disability Discrimination Act and W3C standards. With the candidates role being to support our development team with the project they will gain knowledge of the Drupal open source CMS system whilst working with us.
Essential Requirements :
Studying towards or a Degree in Interactive Design, Digital Design, Graphic Design, HTML, XHTML, CSS
Desired Requirements :
Knowledge of Photoshop and PHP would be useful but not essential. lt is also desirable to have a knowledge of Javascript (Jquery) and of W3C standards.
If you think you fit this description please apply through the Go Wales website here:
http://www.gowales.co.uk/en/Graduate/placements/Details/210420
