Description

One Stop Blogs is a new blogging aggregation site from MacMillan Publishing for people working with in the language teaching profession.

Armed simply with existing branding of One Stop English I created a totally new site site, developing a unique look and feel. The site is built on an existing code structure which I was constrained to but then given the freedom to stretch it as far as I could to come up with something fresh and exciting.

The design I produced brought life to a previously dull uninspiring content model. Once I had the design in place I kicked of the css work which I then passed on to the in-house development team.

Description

I was hired by Sapient to join their team redesigning www.vodafone.co.uk and the then separate online shop offering.

Although given the choice to come in as an IA I opted to work on the visual design team, supporting both the shop side and the main co.uk side. As well as being able to contribute as a design for both areas, this gave me the responsibility of being a sanity check between the two streams, keeping them on track with all visual design developments.

It was a chance for me to learn a different technical approach as all the wireframing and visual design was done in Illustrator. The greatest benefit to this method is that each ‘module’ can be created independently then inserted in to templates in the same way websites do. This was also useful in terms of time saving, because the wireframe files were the same format as the visual design, so assets could transfer across to save reproduction.

Another role I took on was to build a prototype of the new IA for testing purposes. The primary purpose of this was to test the new site hierarchy so I had to make sure the user was able to navigate around the site (built from sliced screen shots). I built it using php includes which meant we were able to change the structure and content quickly on the fly when needed.