| Description:
Website design and development
Client: BBC Wales Online - Education
Company: Simon Rooney Design
Brief: To design and develop a bilingual website that
brings together a series of animated interactive stories, games and facts
on the Iron Age Celts in Wales, aimed primarily at KS2 children (aged
7 - 11), their teachers and their parents.
Additional Info: The difficulty with adapting a subject
like the Celts for education purposes is that there is a limited amount
of historic fact on the subject. Few artefacts have been preserved and
most theories are based on conjecture. So, the BBC producers decided to
demonstrate what the Celts ‘might’ have been like, using imagination,
humour and contemporary references as a means to inspire and provoke interest
in the subject.
Essentially, the visual conceptualisation for the site started from
the inside out. Initial character designs and the animation style of the
Celtic characters, were developed by Siriol Productions in Cardiff. These
were then adapted into 8 individual, interactive stories specifically
for the web environment by Spun Sugar.
When I was commissioned to design the site to house these elements,
I was able to introduce elements from the stories into the interface design
and navigation. An animated intro helps to establish the overall premise
and introduces the navigational themes.
As a way of cross-pollinating content information across BBC sites,
Celtic themed graphic patches and navigational items were also introduced
into other areas of BBCi Wales. This allows users (namely parents and
teachers) to jump out of the Celts site into regional community sites
for more historical information and then jump back in again. See the ‘Where
in Wales’ section of the site for examples.
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