A Weebly website featuring custom illustrations and downloadable resources.
Empowering Design Practices is a research project exploring how community-led design can help empower those who look after historic places of worship to create more open, vibrant and sustainable places that respect and enhance their heritage. It is a collaboration between a number of organisations and individuals including: The Open University, The Glass-House Community Led Design, Historic England (formerly English Heritage), National Lottery Heritage Fund (previously Heritage Lottery Fund) and the Historic Religious Buildings Alliance. The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Empowering Design Practices asked us to develop the graphics and layout for a free resource which included a website along with downloadable resources. The resource helps community groups undertaking projects in their places of worship develop a design rationale for change. The site provides links to relevant resources as well as tools and templates to structure the groups’ thinking and record their ideas.
Empowering Design Practices wanted a unified look across all the design elements, including downloadable pdf resources. They wanted a style that was distinct, but not too far from their existing Empowering Design Practices site in terms of style (colour palette and fonts). Additionally, we had to work within their Weebly website account.
Weebly is a website building tool, similar to services like Wix or SquareSpace. It’s designed for ease of use rather than coding sophistication, so it presented an interestingly different set of design and build challenges to one of our more typical projects. Making effective use of illustrations helped us deliver a positive, accessible and approachable online resource with its own distinct identity.
The home page introduces the guide and its structure, and we used graphic icons as a navigation tool throughout the site. This small site also included an about page with acknowledgements and a list of external resources about developing a design project.
The website and downloadable templates look great and all is clear, easy to navigate and works without problems. This turned out exactly as we wanted, in the face of a very short timescale and budgetary restrictions.