Amnesty International

Project: Protect the human

Protect The Human is project for Amnesty International UK that we have been working on for the past few months in collaboration with our design and strategy partners up in London Made by Many.

So what is it? It is firstly a content publishing platform; populated by fantastic Amnesty videos, galleries of images about the work they do, and masses of bookmarks to fascinating and current content all over the web. But this is not purely a top down publishing platform, users of the site are actively encouraged to create their own content, and rate comment and discuss any item that is on there.

This is a site about activism: the small things people can do which collectively create interest for others and effect change on important issues. Users are prompted to take various actions at every opportunity, depending on the time they have available. Examples of actions can be signing online petitions for the victims of Human rights abuses, attending protests, or simply sending great content to friends to help spread the word. This aspect of the site has been a real eye opener, We have never before seen so many opportunities to take proactive action on such important issues in such an accessible way.

Visit protectthehuman.com

Tourdust

Tourdust is a website for independent tour operators to advertise their diverse and interesting experiences for free. It is centered around the kind of activities which the packaged holidays don't offer; the real gems which lie slightly off the beaten track. Many of the people who run these tours have little access to a global audience, and building and promoting their own websites is often a problem.

We hope people will agree that the design is fantastic, it was produced by our long term Brighton pals Clearleft.

The project was run in an Agile manner, and we think that it illustrates many of the advantages of working in this way. The feature set is refreshingly minimal, and this produces a much better user experience overall. We were constantly re-evaluating the priorities throughout, and anything which wasn't critical to the site's function was cut out.

Visit tourdust.com

Edenbee

The first web site of its kind, Edenbee utilises the social networking model to empower end users to reduce their carbon emissions. Via the web site, Edenbees calculate their carbon footprint and then collaborate with other Edenbees about practical ways to reduce their emissions. Goals are then set by individuals, or by Edenbee, who also track progress and can send email reminders to keep users on target.

A technically complex carbon calculator forms the heart of the web site, based on the AMEE* API, which is recognised as the gold standard of carbon calculators. AMEE is utilised by the British government for its Act on CO2 initiative.

The creative side was handled by our Brighton pals Clearleft.

Visit edenbee.com

Scholastic UK

Project: Teacher Shop

Scholastic sell books for teachers and children to many schools in the United Kingdom, as well as abroad. We were tasked with the redevelopment of their Teacher's Shop before the start of the school year.

Working with Clearleft as the frontend designers and information architects, we created the backend for it in Rails. The project was particularly challenging because of the necessary use of a database migrated from their internal legacy system.

Furthermore, as an extension to the original specification, we produced a highly powerful and intuitive promotions system. The system allows Scholastic staff to create and modify promotions using an intuitive interface. Promotions are built up from an unlimited number of conditions and results (e.g. 'customer has X or more items in their cart' or 'customer is a student'). Each condition and result is then configured to complete the promotion. Customers using the store will then immediately be able to take advantage of promotions to which they are eligible for. The complete system allows Scholastic's marketing department to maintain seasonal promotions without touching the code base or modifying the database schema.

Visit teachershop.scholastic.co.uk

Redeparede

We were tasked with creating the backend system for a free social classifieds website to cover a number of countries in South America.

We worked closely with Clearleft and the client in the discovery phase to produce a plan for the system that would be of most use to the site's consumers. The application was developed ina a matter of months and successfully launched in Jamaica, Mexico, Chile, Argentina and Brasil over the course of several weeks. The number of people signing up to the site and posting adverts was, and still is, extremely high.

Visit redeparede.com