Role
Concept, Art Direction, Design & Online Brand Guardian.
Brief
Offscreen runs education programmes and specializes in facilitating international group art student exchanges between the UK and the Middle East. The brief was to develop their existing offline brand for the web, create a rich user experience and a platform to broadcast their expeditions from.
Strategy
The strategy was to create a website that had the rich tactile style that the book has while allowing students and teachers to interact with the website in an engaging way.
Solution
The solution was to create one education programme website and annual expedition websites. For each website we created a very tactile look and feel by using collage, painting and sketchbook styles and combined this with a sophisticated technical build. Each expedition website’s look and feel reflects the destinations of each expedition.
The use of Google Maps with embedded videos allowed users to have a rich experience and follow each expedition in real time. Flickr was used on each expedition website to display artwork and the photographs which were uploaded each day. In order to create more excitement and awareness before the 2008 website went live a game was produced about the students’ journey. The aim of the game was to answer 8 general knowledge questions correctly in order to whet users’ appetites about the upcoming Offscreen journey.
Results
The result was 2 expedition websites which were updated daily by students and teachers from extraordinary locations such as the valleys of the Scottish Highlands and the dunes of the Middle Eastern deserts. Each website looked more like a painting than your traditional web 2.0 website but used all the latest web 2.0 technology. The websites we’re broadcast in over 2500 schools in the UK and the Middle East. The 2007 expedition website picked up the award for outstanding achievement in website development from the Marketing Association’s Web Awards and the 2008 expedition website won the best community website in the London YDA Design Awards.
