Winner of Brand Partnership of the Year 2014 at the Newsawards.
The first project in my tenure at Guardian Labs. In partnership with Unilever called the Live Better Challenge, its aim was to cover different seven areas of sustainability - one each month. We set our readers sustainability challenges on food waste, energy, recycling, health, water, sourcing sustainability and finally getting involved.
First it needed an identity. I created the logo which changed each month, as each challenge began, with a simple gradient that moved from icon to icon - an animated version was used for presentations, buttons and video titles.
The campaign stretched across all platforms - with a dedicated editorial team, advertorials, lesson plans for schools, events, animations, long form stories and interactive infographics.
An interesting brief that became a great and hugely successful campaign. Life Insurance company Beagle Street wanted to be associated with folk enjoying themselves. Our solution was a live nationwide experiment to find out what things make people happy. The Happy for Life app prompted users to choose a simple activity each day and feedback on how it made them feel. From this we both gathered data on the kinds of things that made them happy, and also what makes the nation happier too.
Involved in the initial brainstorm, I then created the logo and presented to agency and client at several stages in the process up to the campaign kick off. Worked closely with third party apadmi who built the app, internal UX, and the client developing it through several prototypes to get to the final version.
The data collected from the app fed into an interactive dashboard. Updated daily to show the current mood of the nation, this took the same look and feel as the app. Learnings could then be used to create content on the Guardian site.
There were also several print executions in the campaign, the one shown was in the magazine Do Something and was on back-to-back pages. It was a template for creating a 'fortune teller' like the ones in the school playground. Tremendous fun.
This site won Silver in the Online Advertising Brand Microsite category at the Lovie Awards.
The travel brief had a twist. The site was to give our readers a taster of what South Africa offered, but split into two areas. Classic South African activities (must-do) and things you might not think the country offered (something new).
The split screen idea was a novel way to solve the problem. Working equally well on mobile as well, the tourist board recently came back for an update and we refreshed the site adding more content.
Take a look and let me know what you think
A mobile only webapp that used the inbuilt functionality of smartphones as a way into travel content. Users launch the app from a traffic driver or link on the Guardian site and are prompted to move the phone from side to side to select the destination they wish to go to. The compass graphic then scrolls through the different cities, full screen imagery changing as you go, giving the impression of a working compass.
Once a desired destination is selected, users have a swipeable gallery of top 10 activities with a map showing their location. Sponsored by Hilton it therefore also showed the location of their hotel.
The client wanted something that was different from a normal sponsored hub on the Guardian, and also wanted something specifically for mobile. This execution ticked both boxes and was very successful, with the client coming back a year later requesting more destinations to be added and updating the content.
Remember this is designed for mobile, but please take a look
Goldman Sachs wanted to be seen to be supporting up and coming young businesses, which was perfect for the Guardian's small business network. We decided to tell the stories of three entrepreneurs, from their point of view, with fantastic imagery, animated graphics and statistics.
The point I wanted to make here was that entrepreneurs are not elite businessmen, they're not all Richard Branson types, Shoreditch roundabout techies, or cheap-suited types from the Apprentice. They are all around us. Anyone can make their dream a reality.
The best way to set the scene was a video that showed our three protagonists walking through an everyday morning crowd of commuters. Just three faces in the crowd that emerged and came to the foreground, which then became the navigation. Short, sharp type overlaid the video to give real impact and drama.
Each story was broken up by a series of animated graphics and images to hold interest and keep the reader wanting more, and to keep engagement high. The tone and style I wanted for this was to be fresh, graphic and cool - as that fitted the young audience the client wanted to reach.
I'm very happy with this site. It was great to work on, we worked collaboratively both internally and externally to achieve a fantastic result. Please take a look and see what you think
I'm going to wager you have no idea where the almonds on your croissant come from, or the economic, social or environmental impact the production and transportation of your breakfast had? There's a lot about nuts you don't know.
This interactive surfaced the stories of cashews, almonds and hazelnuts. Clean, simple illustrated graphics told the complicated global story of three of the most popular nuts we consume today. A ton of information when we started this project, so many statistics but I wanted to have a clear structure that was easy to follow so we broke it right down to make it easy to understand, but still keep enough detail so readers get the full picture.
Thinking about the mobile version from the outset was important and we ensured it worked across many browsers - kudos to James McLeman the interactive designer I worked with on this. Please take a look and see what you think
This interactive was designed and built by the fantastic nice and serious. It was to tell the story Pail Oil. A product that we use everyday by all of us without even knowing what is, or where is came from. This interactive was to shows its global effect and discuss what the alternatives might be.
When I came to it the story and the structure of the information was not in the right order. It had an interactive map at its heart and it wasn't conveying the power that this largely unheard of ingredient with such a massive impact around the world, was sat in our cupboards in our homes.
We had a working session where I came up with idea for the video intro, the typography that needed to be overlaid and the pace that it needed to be in order to really get the message across. The colours and tone were important for impact and breaking up the story with images and graphics kept the user engaged.
See what you think here and find out what you washed you hair with this morning
Locked away in a room for a month with the cream of the Telegraph's reporters and editors, no windows, an eccentric lawyer and a pile of CDs with the expenses details of every MP in government. Tough, pressurised work, but incredibly rewarding - we all huddled round the tv every night as our revelations led the 9 O'Clock news once we published.
Lead designer from day one (under Creative Director Himesh Patel) I liaised with the most senior of Telegraph staff to produce visuals for the paper, magazine and web. Illustrating the stories for one of the biggest journalistic scoops of all time was an incredible experience. Ensuring pages had enough visual interest with the huge swathes of information at our disposal was a challenge – especially as circulation went through the roof – along with the time pressures of a daily news environment and a necessarily small team.
Sony's new phone had a camera that was particularly good in low-light, they also had accessories for running - a campaign about great city night runs was born.
Responsible for the concept, location and art direction of this cover wrap shoot for the Guardian Weekend magazine. I wanted the image to wrap around from front to back, for stronger impact. The challenge is getting the set up just right so the cover has the standout crop, but also the reader is rewarded as they open the mag out to get the full panorama of the scene. The perspective on the bridge, and the stunning light, really made this cover jump out.
Inside front continued the shoot and told the story with inside back listing events where readers could get involved. A series of advertorials in the following weeks showed routes you could run through cities, and there were a number of case study videos as part of the campaign, all of which took the same look and feel.
I was approached to be part of a launch of a new newspaper back in 2005 (what you'd call a startup these days) and so produced a dummy to be taken for investment. It was to rival the Racing Post as a betting newspaper and website that would be one of a kind.
From humble beginnings when there were only a handful of us, first edition was 9 months later with over 100 staff and it is still the only national newspaper to have launched since the Independent.
Designing such a massive publication from scratch was a huge challenge. Grids, fonts, racing cards, a design team, a picture desk, a CMS all needed thinking about and setting up. I learnt a lot about the value of a good production process, and the meaning of hard work during that time.
