- WHO IS JUILA’S HOUSE? -
Julia's House is the only charity in Dorset that offers such care and enjoys the patronage of celebrities such as: Martin Clunes, Lesley Waters, Chris Jarvis, Harry Redknapp and Debra Stephenson to name but a few.
Julia's House was established in 2003, in memory of Julia Perks who sadly died of cancer in 1997. 2013 saw their 10th anniversary and so they commissioned TMB and Deshok to produce a raft of marketing materials and assets to help mark the occasion and to re-brand and refresh the charity for the coming years.
- THE 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY BRAND -
First things first; Julia's House needed a new brand to help with celebrations, but rather than create something that was completely different, Deshok opted to retain the existing logo’s recognition and good will and give it a centenary makeover; therefore enjoying the best of both worlds. A couple off-the-wall ideas were also thrown into the mix, more from personal reasons than professional, after all sometimes ‘off-the-wall’ can be ‘right on-trend’ so it’s best to let the client decide.
AND THE WINNER IS…
The final choice was Julia's House, Party Parcel. This option was chosen for its no-nonsense and unmistakable birthday party message, while clearly retaining the existing brand’s look and feel. Job done and done! Click here to read about the Julia's House brand in progress...
- NEXT THE WEBSITE -
In this case we weren't required to build the website only design it - ONLY?
To design a project for another agency to do the technical build throws up its own challenges. Everything needed to be visually communicated, not leaving anything up for interpretation. This meant that everything needed to be created and demonstrated, including the website interface, key pages, assets, logos, buttons and animated transitions etc. once this was complete and everyone was happy, then the graphics could be supplied ready for the build.
- THEN THE BRIEF -
Clean, simple, uncluttered. A strong content management system that the team at Julia’s House could quickly pick-up, run with and get their teeth into. A child friendly look and feel and yet not childish. This was a site to inform, involve and inspire the visitor to take part, sign-up for the newsletter or leave a donation. Not a site that children will visit, but it needed to show that it was for children to benefit from.
- THE SITE MAP -
As a guide we had the original site to work from, but over the years it had grown into a beast that needed taming, tiding-up and making sense of. There was a lot of content that needed to be easy to discover and absorb. A clear site map was needed. This took quite a while to design, as pages and sections were added then taken away, but once signed off this became an invaluable tool for all involved. Click here to view the Site Map .pdf
- WEBSITE CONCEPTS X3 -
Within the parameters of the brief we created 3 website concepts, an option was chosen and developed. Above are the 2 that got away.
- THE FINAL DESIGN -
The final design was clean and uncluttered, nesting sections and pages away in a neat 3 stage menu system, designed to help the home page to look less daunting on arrival. A crisp red and blue colour scheme was adopted and carried through from the brand. Round corners were the order of the day and although more difficult to achieve, the final production made it worth it. This theme was carried through from image frames, text boxes, lines, dashes and dividers. A cool e4e4e4 RGB grey was used for main background to help content standout and be noticed.
- SLIDESHOW -
A key requirement was that the site should be dynamic and ever changing in its content, so to really hammer this home a large banner slideshow was included. Most sites seem to have these, but in our case, TMB developed a custom CMS that would allow the client to choose their own images, edit headlines and click through links, all online and without the need for specialist software. We had a strong idea as to the kind of images which should be used, and the client agreed with this quite passionately, so a style guide was also put together along with a large galley of images for recommendation.
- THE PAGES -
All key pages and sections were designed through to client approval and finished artwork for TMB to implement within the CMS templates. Attention to detail was key here, everything had to be clearly demonstrated and not left to interpretation, including the feature, main, (side bar) and sub menus, showing how buttons looked when rolled over and what would happen and how they would look when clicked!
- COHERENCE -
A criticism for the original site was that coherence had been lost with a miss-match of icons and clipart images that weren't created for Julia's House. This needed to be addressed in this new project. We opted to use Adobe Illustrator programme and Photoshop for image editing only and keep a very tight rein on art direction throughout the design and build. Toward to end of the project we set up shop at the TMB offices and sat right next to the developers, to be on hand for any creative input. In short the new brand, website and all digital assets were created by Deshok using 2 programs, the result is a website that is built for a particular purpose, based on 10 years of experience.
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| CUSTOM SOCIAL ICONS |
- iPhone HOME SCREEN ICON -
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| IPHON / IPAD CUSTOM HOME SCREEN ICON |
Although a mobile version of the site was planned for, as yet it has not been made live, however the main desktop is compatible with tablets and smart devices so it required an iPhone/iPad Home screen icon so visitors could leave an easily recognisable icon link for return visits to Julia's House.
Find out more about Julia's House, The Dorset Children's Hospice, visit their website at: www.juliashouse.org You could even make a donation.
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