Technology Enhanced Learning rebrand

Recently the University of Plymouth has been rebranded as Plymouth University, therefore I was tasked to rebrand our departments online presence, www.technologyenhancedlearning.net.

We had to change our logo to ‘Technology Enhanced Learning with Plymouth University’. The ‘with Plymouth University’ text had to stay dark grey, and as we’ve become quite attached to our magenta colour the logo really sorted itself out.

We initially created the new logo with a solid white background, and we were really amazed about how striking the magenta stood out from the screen, this then became the focus for our style. The problem with the previous website was clutter. The text was pretty small, which is okay as long as there is imagery to break it up, but there wasn’t. Therefore this time I was conscious that if we were going to go down the minimalist route I had the opportunity to address this. Before our readers would view a full screen width of small text and it was hard to decide where to focus your attention. Now the user is presented with a clean, refreshing, modern, simple interface with a fixed width. These days I prefer to design fixed width websites as its easier to cater for the varied screen sizes, ranging from small mobile devices (roughly 240- 320 pixels) to large screens such as my 27″ iMac with a massive width of 2560 pixels.

We have kept the ATbar developed by University of Southampton as it is a great OpenSource tool for accessibility and it contains some really nifty features. I won’t list them here, but be sure to check it out if you haven’t seen it before.

At the time of writing this I am firstly launching this site, but also developing my entire site. One thing I am experimenting with is the new HTML5 media queries. This will allow me to write multiple stylesheets that display depending on screen sizes. As HTML5 support grows I’ll will be phasing this into this project. Currently this site is HTML5 ready but doesn’t use any semantic tags, this will be phased in at a different date.