Hollidazed

Last week was the annual FE First awards arranged by the Marketing Network (Marketers in Post 16 Education). For those of you who don’t has the pleasure of working in the UK Further Education system in marketing, communications or design this may not seem a big deal but these awards are the closest we ever come to glitz, glamour and a small award certificate/trophy. (I should say at this point that I have never actually attended!)

So why am I mentioning this seemingly uninteresting minor event on the larger social calender? …well it’s because every year they give prizes to the “best” current College websites so I thought I would share the results and give a few thoughts – although I hope you will make up your own minds:

Winner – North Devon College

Uses Flash navigation and inline styles, the judges said the site stood out as it was “using design techniques more often used within the private sector as opposed to education”. This in indeed true as most education sites that are worth anything these days design exclusively with web standards unlike this site. Some things here are built okay and look alright but overall I’m disappointed that this is deemed to be the best thing in the sector.

Runner Up – Deeside College

I am even more disappointed with this site purely because it has been entirely built with tables and will be completely inaccessible to many users.

Honourable Mention – Aberdeen College

If I had designed this website I would be disappointed, but only at not having won this award easily. I think this is a great looking site with a great little user interface and to seal the deal it’s built really well using web standards (style and behaviour kept separate from content) and accessible to everyone!

Honourable Mention – James Watts College of Further Education

Again built exclusively with tables – make up your own mind please?

To sum up…

I am disappointed because these awards have essentially given the wrong sort of encouragement to people who are getting it wrong when it comes to best practice and providing the best user experience possible. These people should clearly be encouraged to evaluate how they work and not told how great they are when they have a inaccessible website.

I’m really please the Aberdeen College website was in there and I’ve seen some other College websites this year that were overlooked and are equally as good. I really do think web standards are beginning to make an impact in the area of both College and University websites in the UK. This hopefully means that the accessibility levels of sites is much improved while I’m sure various institutions are also now seeing some of the business benefits of web standards.

The BBC news website ran a story the other day titled “most websites are failing disabled” and it’s a shame that the Further Education sector choose to highlight just those sorts of websites last week instead of celebrating the sites that have clearly moved in the right direction producing both visually appealing and accessible sites.

I can see that building a commercially successfully site that is accessible can seem difficult to some but in web standards we have the tools and the education sector must surely embrace this. There are plenty of good recent examples of education websites that meet this brief… just please, as a general rule, don’t look at the one’s that win awards!

About a month ago I had the amazing experience of spending 3 days and nights in New York. This is something I had always wanted to do and after many years of waiting I finally made it and had a great few days taking in the sites with Becky (while also celebrating 2 great years of marriage in style!).

We did all the usual sightseeing, which is well documented on my Flickr account, but as this is my art/design/web blog I thought I would talk about something that really inspired me when I least expected it.

The inspiration came in the form of an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum…. having made our way up to view the famous concrete structure, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, I was initially disappointed to find the building is currently covered by scaffolding for essential maintenance work. We went in undeterred expectant to see famous works by the likes of Picasso and Van Gogh but the real inspiration came in the form of the main exhibition which was a collection of work by the architect Zaha Hadid entitled “Thirty Years in Architecture”.

The exhibition showed a range of Hadid’s working process including many paintings and sketches exploring forms and colour schemes and adopting thematic approaches throughout her work.

It struck me that the sort of work I design actually has a lot in common with architecture in that web design is very much about organising information into different spaces and trying to be innovative about how everything fits together and interacts… the emphasis being on space and how well different objects/elements exist alongside each other.

The connection of traditional art to Hadid’s designs seemed to me to be key to her ability to find new ideas and break out of the conventional. It simply struck me that maybe sometimes the design I work with is too separated from any sort of real process.

There are web sites out there that disprove my point but maybe the issue of of creative development in web design balanced against the creative restraints of what is actually viable/accessible/possible should be looked into more.

Having always been fascinated with architecture I can definitely see myself looking into this more somewhere down the line.

Since launching this blog I’ve unfortunately struggled to find the time to work on what is ultimately most important to me as someone who works making websites… the design. I love working with web standards and am committed to accessibility and usability but most of all the reason I choose to spend 4 years studying art and graphic design is because I care about how things look visually. It’s therefore long overdue that I finally made some time to work on an initial template for this site.

I really hope the design will evolve over time and see this space as the place for trying out things that I perhaps wouldn’t lean towards on commercial projects… just because I can really. I think it’s healthy for designers to look at what inspires them and I guess as well as talking about the web I almost hope this space can become a kind of web sketch book for me.

I’ve deliberately started with a simple design and wanted to use white space well to balance the artwork I devised for the header and logo. The image used was inspired by a postcard I picked up in Berlin of the Sony Centre. I love the architecture of the roof which is like a giant tent of steel and glass that almost floats over the building. I really liked the idea of trying to work with this image out of context.

My idea with the colour scheme was to keep things really simple and almost sway towards primary colours… this was simply because I wanted to work with a bold pallet that wasn’t part of my usual day job.

Anyway hope you like it and come back to watch it evolve over time any comments are always welcome.