This project took place over 8 weeks in 2006, while working with Ixxus. It involved spending some weeks in Hereford, with some incredible long drives across beautiful countryside, starting out at 6am from London to start work-shopping at 10am. As intense as it was, it turned out to be a great project and working with some really nice people.

We started off with a User Profiles workshop (see above) that focussed the client to identify our target audience, which in turn helps to inform the design process. Herefordshire has an unique blend of demographics – that included job seekers, seasonal workers, tourists, young families and the over 50’s. The portal needed to appeal and communicate to all of them, covering leisure, work and life events. We also had to factor in that some communities in rural Herefordshire are more isolated than others and relied on accurate up-to-date information about events in the area and were most likely to be on a slow internet connection.

A Brand Development workshop gave us an opportunity to brainstorm with the client. They had already chosen the name and URL ‘myherefordshire.com’, which was a blessing as we worked to such tight timescales. Together we defined some core characteristics that the online portal should have. It had to be ‘FRIENDLY, FAST & RELEVANT’. This become our mantra for the following weeks and became the driver to develop the brand.

The ‘FRIENDLY, FAST & RELEVANT’ inspired a 3 look and feel mood-boards for the portal’s brand. The preferred one (pictured) was chosen as it leant more on the ‘friendly’ characteristic.

Using the soft edged ‘VAG Rounded’ font (VAG is Volkswagen & Audi Group is you were wondering) gave a warm and friendly quality to ‘my Herefordshire.com’ brand. The colours chosen reflected the rural nature of Herefordshire, while the swooping line echoed the contour of its landscape. Later in the process we came up with a tagline ‘Bringing Us Together’ to voice the community aspect of the portal.

The UI design of the portal all fell into place once the brand was developed. Behind the scenes we had sessions to define the scope of the project, working out what functionality would be present in the first phase. This mapped out a set of page designs that needed to be considered. The most interesting page for me was creating the homepage. It was crying out to have a human element to it, so we commissioned a photographer to take photographs of local people in the county. These formed a set of homepage visuals that appeared and rotated on a regular basis, keeping the homepage looking fresh.

Looking at the portal a few years on, it still holds its original qualities of friendly, fast and relevant. For example, parents are able to check out children’s events or emergency numbers; while tourists to the area can find accommodation and places to visit. In addition, seasonal workers will be able to find out more information about living and working in Herefordshire in five different languages – English, Portuguese, Russian, Lithuanian and Polish.