Details: St Barnabas Hospice were putting the finishing touches to their brand spanking new hopsice building when they approached Article1o to provide an online booking system to reward their donors with a guided tour of the premises. With multiple thousand people involved and very specific requirements regarding the bookings and the output of tour group data for the guides, a bespoke system made the most sense. I built this web application using Classic ASP and MS SQL server and it proved a massive success, with lots of additional tours being added to account for demand. The St Barnabas team have since said that without the system it would have been a logistical nightmare for them to manage.

“John always replies promptly to requests, is good at solving problems and coming up with solutions. He explains things clearly and completes work on time and within budget – a pleasure to work with!”
Janet Parsons, Communications Manager, St Barnabas House and Chestnut Tree House Hospices

Details: Sarah Britten-Jones is a British visual artist with a background in ceramics. Some of her work involves the process of appropriation, where something is taken and changed very slightly in order to create a new piece with new meanings, so her website has been designed to look similar to the website of a large well-known global furniture store. The site is built in WordPress and acts as Sarah’s portfolio and her blog.

“John is a very intelligent designer, with a thorough understanding of his subject and always responds promptly and effectively to queries.”
Sarah Britten-Jones

Details: Touchpoint is the appropriate name for communication from Designation, focussed on the monthly e-shot supported by a blog where subscribers can post their feedback. The e-shot is on edition 25 as I write this, meaning it’s been going out on time every month for over 2 years, which is a remarkable achievement for a company this size.

My involvement is in preparing, test and sending the e-shot, in conjunction with updates to the blog, and the Designation website. I’ve also set the blog up so that updates are syndicated out to the Designation Twitter account and Facebook business page via Ping.FM. I set those social media platforms up a while back and they are also under the Touchpoint banner currently.

Details: When Dreamspace wanted to evolve they came to Designation having worked successfully together in the past. I ran the brand consultancy phase including workshops with the client. This phase following the Designation brand process to research and define a new brand based on the big idea that was identified to match the new direction the company was going in.

We proposed a number of varied brand names which were measured against a range of crtieria. From those option the client choose a name that I’d created, Verasseti, which is based around truth and integrity, values integral to the proposition. The initial branding launch collateral was then developed including a new website, which I designed and developed.

“John is excellent to work with, delivers good results to deadlines. Would definitely recommend his work, and would work with John in the future.”
James Percy, Director, Verasetti

Details: Reading Uni knew that there was a real lack of secondary school teachers in certain subjects. To tackle this they set up some new Subject Knowledge Enhancement (SKE) courses aimed at fast tracking new recruits onto the Post-graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) courses needed to become a qualified teacher.

However they were having trouble finding suitable qualified students to fill the places. I was part of a team that ran an intense last minute marketing campaign in late December and January to try and fill courses starting in February.

The techniques we applied got the campaign up-and-running within a couple of days and qualified potential applicants back in front of the entry board within a week. Over the course of the campaign we exceeded targets by over 400% and over 80% of the students on some courses came through our very cost-effective campaign.

Details: SLS Group is an event delivery and implementation company that provide services Worldwide for a event organisers who need overlay, look and/or fit-out services. Be it temporary structures, way-finding, flags or fence scrim SLS can do it all. They needed a website full of images to help illustrate this wide range of services that they can offer, and that’s what Designation delivered. I was involved primarily in the early consultation and the development of the site itself which utilises JavaScript (including the MooTools framework) to add movement and interactivity to the image browsing.

Details: The Oddies are a series of childrens books (and hopefully soon a TV series) from the author Grant Slatter. Using the great character illustrations produced by the Oddies team we produced a number of Flash and CMS driven websites covering both Oddieworld itself as well as the ReadWithMe week campaign that was rolled out over the following years. I was involved in the production of all the website as well as interactive CD’s that supported the ReadWithMe campaign.

Details: Averil has been a client of Designation for a number of years usually working as a project manager on a education based project either in print or online. She needed a site to showcase her work over the years and help promote the fact that she ‘Woman of Outstanding Achievement 2007′. I worked as consultant and developer on this website which is designed to reflect her personality and to allow individual sections to be promoted seperately dependant on the audience she is talking to.

Details: Bronzeoak deliver energy from sustainable sources so as bio-ethanol. I acted as a brand consultant and programme manager for their corporate re-brand and subsequent collateral updates. These included a new content managed website, where I managed external suppliers for site development.

Details: Cubeez is a kids TV show still seen occasionally in the UK (it used to be on GMTV) and elsewhere worldwide. When the first series launched in 2001 the production team wanted a state-of-the-art interactive website to support the show and continue the excitement of the characters into the online world. I worked as project manager, overseeing an 8 person team on this £130K project. Utilising SQL Server (with all text and audio coming out of the database to enable multiple languages), ASP and Flash (with Generator at the time) it was a cutting-edge site and introduced all sorts of user interactivity that wouldn’t become mainstream over the years that followed (and some that still haven’t).