The website of newly appointed danish PM, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, required a significant design of his personal website, larsløkke.dk, as he took office minutes ago. Central functional desires were a very high level of interaction with web 2.0 social sites and a high-end design quality level.
BEE3 designed and executed the overall web identity and web 2.0 strategy - as well as produced the site in open source TYPO3.
I congratulate Lars Løkke Rasmussen and I’m glad we had the chance to be such a major part of the team behind the new PM.
We were recently given the task of creating an online presence for the newly formulated green vision of government leading party, Venstre. The platform available was a combined venstre.dk front page teaser and a new sub site.
It can be experienced at groenvaekst.venstre.dk
The purpose of the campaign needed a powerful visual reference - and so an image visualizing a new path towards green growth policy was selected.
The dominant content of the presentation is two speeches by the prime minister - and consequently the video player needed an eye-catching place in the design.
The windmill imagery and the video components should become the center of the entire presentation to give the viewer a simple and clear picture of the perspectives at stake.
As for interaction and reference to the rest of the party’s main site, the key point was an explicit traffic-guiding trail between the teaser banner and the sub site.
The client liked it. It was simple and gave a good setting for the presentations by the PM.
Another strength was that we could do it all in-house - and quickly. I believe that’s quite important too, both being capable of delivering quality work and making good cost-benefit sense.
All done within the week - from brainstorm to new campaign site.
This is an old truth - but still a very important truth: You have to design for the future, not for the present. The fact is that if you design something for a specific project and focus only on what is specified here and now you will inevitably design something that will turn obsolete extremely fast.
I’m thinking about how you explain this as I just had a cool experience with doing a design for a client where we emphasized this approach:
- Specify what you’re going to produce
- Design for what’s way beyond what you have specified for the current project
- Take the design back to what’s specified and implement only that - yet, keeping all the good stuff from the future-based design
What basically happens is this: You get a stronger design that will hold on for a much longer time because you don’t bump into design limitations too quickly as technology evolves.
To me, a webdesign foundation should last not 1 or 2 years but 3-5 years but when you design the foundation it is an absolute neccesity that you include the future needs in what you’re thinking about producing right now. It’s just another funny thing that sounds so easy and so obvious but appears pretty hard to get right down in the trenches.
Although it’s a daunting project, I’m happy to bringing the new typo3.org project well underway. I’ve been meeting with Jens Hoffmann of d.k.d all day to review the designs and to discuss how we’re facilitating all the new advanced community features with TYPO3 extensions. The project is extremely interesting from a general Open Source point of view with our collaboration methods challenging conventional thinking about how to cooporate on Open Source development. It will be intriguing to see how it works out to work together with now 20+ web agencies from Germany, Denmark, Holland, Ireland, USA and more coming in.
I’m very inspired about the drive and motivation coming from everywhere to contribute to the project.
Recently launched government party, Venstre’s, new FAQ. Apart from the easy search method I really have a soft spot for accordion interfaces that let’s users have multiple FAQ elements open at the same time.
We’ve started using secret Facebook groups extensively for client project sites - and we’re really happy about it. It enables us to communicate with clients without forcing people to reenter their data. Other companies use Facebook as their intranet - which definately also has great advantages. At BEE3 we prefer to have that a little seperate, though. But opening up client communication about design proposals, prototypes, specifications and more has been very powerful - and also just plain fun.
