what's occurring?
It's a rare Tuesday night without any work to do, so I'm going to write a little update on what I've been up to recently. In all honesty, I'm waiting for a film to download so rather than twiddling my thumbs I thought I'd be productive instead.
And so, what have I been up to? Some logo design, some brand guidelines, a new website for the Foundation, a whole lot of wedding invitations, and other bits and bobs.
Firstly, logo design.
The Grub Club
The Grub Club is an amazing initiative set up Aisling Kirwan, an ex-teacher with a love of cooking, that provides free cooking classes to low-income families. School children and their parents attend the class to learn how to cook nutritious and affordable meals in a fun environment. The club is based on the knowledge that when we eat well our brains can function fully and we can reach our full potential.
Aisling came to me asking for a new logo that was fun, brightly coloured, conveyed the idea of healthy eating and, most importantly, was approachable and not intimidating.
I drew a chubby yellow pepper and overlaid a distressed texture and the Faith and Glory typeface.
Burnet News Club website
At the Foundation, their beloved Burnet News Club has just embarked on it's 4th year!
And it's a big one – they have 61 schools taking part and approximately 600 students. Their previous website (built on a rudimentary free WordPress theme) had plodded along and allowed them to pilot the blog element for the club, but the cracks were starting to show and it didn't have the functionality that they needed from it. While the Foundation has grand ideas for an all-singing, all-dancing new platform in the next 1-2 years, we needed some sort of site for the interim.
It had to be WordPress, as they wanted to keep a similar backend so that the teacher's weren't thrown by it and they could keep all the existing accounts, posts and comments. They wanted to show more of the children's contributions, making it easier to see the discussion across the topic. They wanted visitors to the site who had no knowledge of the club to be able to see and understand what the club was. They wanted it to be responsive, as increasingly the club members are accessing the site on tablets or phones. Finally, they wanted to make the content more accessible for teachers, more visual, more exciting. For this, I thought a magazine style theme would work best, and settled on Domino, from WP Zoom.
I’ve still got a bit of work to do on optimisation, but we've had great feedback from the returning teachers and the club is already inundated with comments and posts from the new club members.
Some screenshots are below, but visit the full site at www.burnetnewsclub.com
And as it had been a hectic summer at the Foundation with teacher training, programme design, website construction, event creation, impact reporting and much more, I made the lovely staff there some presents.
