This is an example of a User Interface and website revamp project for a large community centre based in King’s Cross London.
My role in the project involved brainstorming ideas, drawing the new content and banners, considering the user experience and seeking ways in which to make the website design more user friendly, functional and useful for users of the Living Centre.
The brief
After a couple of conversations and a Zoom call with the team at the Living Centre, I was commissioned to design and revamp the website to ‘look less boring’, represent the institution and add some more practical functionality.
I took this a step further. Although digital design is a faucet of my skills like many designers of 2020’s. I wanted to add more than just a simple “yes man” approach to this project. With my commercial experience and creative direction skills. I didn’t want to just say ‘bam’ take their money and go. There is a website and leave. I wanted this website to work not only as part of the brand but as a website and tool for their business.
Without barraging my client saying ‘do this better, because I think so.’ I wanted to know what needed to work. What questions do customers ask – I wanted to do my homework.
Website Design Question Questions
Some of these questions would have been:-
- WHY?
- What do people tend to ask?
- What are they looking for?
- Who is the website for?
- What did they want the website to do?
- How do they earn money?
These were the starting blocks, and – it should be noted that these were not all of the questions and rounds of discussions.
The home page needed a lot of TLC
After communicating and carrying out research, I had both inspiration and the key criteria in order to create a new look and feel for the website.
I started exploring the ideas with the homepage first.
The home page, as is the case with most websites, was one of the busiest pages in regards to content and information. The Living Centre’s page was loaded with information but in no particular order and without many calls to action either. I tried to turn the home page into a lobby with well-labelled doors and opportunities to funnel users into either making contact or leading to a making money lead enquiry.
I tried my best to capitalize on this page while trying to keep it to the client’s brief. Very accessible, on-brand, interesting, informative and structured. Some of these changes and updates would appear subtle to the outside reader. But many, even the smallest changes were generally very deliberate and considered.
When recreating this page, I tried to break it down into structured manageable and relevant chunks for the web user.
Design The Hire Page
This page actually was a follow-up project after I have revamped the core look of the website and rebuilt it with Divi. Their website and this page had a lot of untapped value.
Upon spotting the hire section needed some more content and juice, and I got to it.
This page covered both coming up with additional UI designs ( although the guides were now already set due to the first project ) and creating more content too.
Some examples of this are illustrating a top-down view of a floorplan for all the rooms to hire, prices, 3D drawings / oblique drawings of the areas, bolder use of area photography amount other various things.
I tried to make this page a silent ‘Hire Space!’ salesman for the Living Centre.
Experimentation & Design
The brief from Living Centre was nothing quite like what I have worked on before. Creating websites and UI’s, I have worked on plenty of these. Creating plan drawings and landing pages. I have worked on these too. But having all these combined into one single project was an interesting challenge.
Below are some samples of the design, such as the banners and some f the early works in progress.
Website Design | Putting the website together
The website was already made using WordPress and Divi. After working on the design stage for the project I was also commissioned put it all together based on my visuals.
Being an existing licence holder of Divi it was not too much of a stretch for me to build these new pages and add the content I had illustrated and designed. I worked in a non-destructive way for the home page. Behind the scenes, I created a ‘master template’ which I switched with the existing home page when it was ready to go!
Testimonial From the Living Centre
“We worked with Jimm to redesign our website. The brief was simple to bring our website, which was static, had little character and was boring alive, fun and informative. We were not disappointed with the outcome.
From start to finish, my interaction with Jimm was professional, stress-free and I had complete trust in his ability to deliver. Jimm took the time to listen to what I wanted but also brought his own ideas, experience and creativity so that the end design was more rounded. He understood that I needed to see things in a visual context and have some flexibility to ‘play’ around with a few ideas. The challenge was we had to do all this via zoom but Jimm made it very easy; being patient when I had technical difficulties making the whole process enjoyable, stress-free and highly personal. “
– The Living Centre
Other Website & Graphic Design based posts
- IDesign project – UI Design
- The design journey
- Vector Illustration Sample
- How I created a story game in Adobe Animate
External Links & Services
– Freelance Website Design
– Creative Direction
– Vector Illustrations
– Content & Blog Design
Website design by jimmsdesign
