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Silk Pearce has redesigned the Norfolk & Norwich Open Studios website to help attract new visitors. In the first three weeks since its launch, the site received 1,000 visitors.
The 2013 scheme is expected to attract around 30,000 visitors and involves coordinating activities from 450 artists, across 231 locations in Norfolk.
Andrew Sharman, website designer at Silk Pearce, designed a site with larger imagery, cleaner page layouts and improved navigation.
The redesign of www.openstudios.org.uk includes a powerful new web application, which in the future will allow every participating artist to directly upload details of their planned activities and will help Open Studios streamline planning and production processes.
Shown here: Artist, Sarah Cannell's individual directory page.
‘Silk Pearce has created an exciting new look and feel for the Open Studios site to improve the visitor experience but has also helped streamline our in-house production processes,’ said Kirsty Falconer, Project Officer at Norfolk & Norwich Festival. ‘Their recommended approach using online forms will save significant admin costs, eliminates several labour-intensive proofing stages and makes it easier to manager subsequent mailings of brochures, posters and other materials,’ she adds.
Open Studios is managed by the Norfolk & Norwich Festival and the site redesign features many of the colours and branding elements from the Festival’s own new visual identity, also designed by Silk Pearce.
Read the full press release here
Silk Pearce has helped to rebrand Sharps Redmore, one of the UK’s largest and longest established firms of specialist acoustic consultants, with a new corporate identity, literature and website.
The bold new look has been specifically designed to promote Sharps Redmore as the overall company name and to bring a fesh, contemporary and more integrated feel to its communications materials.
The new logo design uses a digitised wave-shaped graphic to represent the science of acoustics. The description ‘Accoustic Consultants’ in smaller type has the potential to be varied if new business divisions are added in the future.
The design overhaul includes a pallet of new corporate colours and typography applied to stationery, signage and a redesigned and restructured website.
www.sharpsredmore.co.uk features a dynamic version of the wave graphic on its home page and uses a highly flexible full content management system allowing Sharps Redmore staff to quickly and easily update text and images on the site.
Andrea Gosling, designer, Silk Pearce, with Kieran Gayler, director, Sharps Redmore, presenting the company's new building signage and one of its new look reports
‘Sharps Redmore has had a new management team and business owners in the last few years but felt that the marketing materials had not kept pace. Their new visual identity has been specifically designed to present a striking, more confident look and works equally well in print as well as online,’ said Andrea Gosling, designer at Silk Pearce.
View the full press release here
Silk Pearce designer, Ian Coote, has discovered an old picture card of Benjamin Britten. After moving house Ian stumbled upon the unusual find in an old chest of drawers, left behind by the previous owner.
“It was a real coincidence because I had just completed the Friday Afternoons website which is in celebration of Britten’s centenary and encourages young people to enjoy music,” explains Ian.
The Friday Afternoons project is being run by Aldeburgh Music in partnership with the Britten-Pears Foundation.
The picture card was issued with Brooke Bond Tea and was no 46 in a series of 50. The Benjamin Britten illustration is by Angus McBridge and text by Virginia Shankland.
Benjamin Britten co-founded the world renowned Aldeburgh Festival in 1948.
Find out about Friday Afternoons
Silk Pearce has designed and launched a new website for Aldeburgh Music’s Friday Afternoons programme. The new project is to encourage schools to take part in a nationwide singing initiative in celebration of Benjamin Britten’s centenary.
www.fridayafternoonsmusic.co.uk has been designed to make it easy for schools and young people to join in and learn more about Britten’s life and music by singing his Friday afternoons song cycle.
“The challenge was to include lots of interactive features in the site and we are really pleased with the end result, ” says Rob Steer, senior designer at Silk Pearce.
The site was designed to allow teachers, no matter what their musical or technical background, or availability of IT equipment, to get involved. They can listen to recordings of each song, download teaching resource packs, backing tracks and lesson plans, upload audio or video clips of their own performances, or review other schools recordings.
Ann Barkway, project manager at Aldeburgh Music, says “Silk Pearce has designed a striking and integrated look for all of our Friday Afternoon communications. Many teachers have already told us it is exceptionally easy to use, needs no specialist skills and has everything to encourage young people to sing.”
“The whole website works alongside the other promotional material we’ve designed too,” adds Rob Steer.
Silk Pearce has designed a distinctive visual identity for Friday Afternoons, all the resource packs, literature, T-shirts and other promotional items. The branding uses a series of differently coloured circles – one for each song – giving a fresh visual approach with a contemporary feel.
View the full press release here.
Silk Pearce’s new website design for Wysing Arts Centre has been developed to demonstrate the centre’s breadth of work. Wysing, based near Cambridge, is one of the leading research centres for the visual arts in Europe.
Ian Coote, designer at Silk Pearce, reviews the new site’s pages
The new site www.wysingartscentre.org appeals to new audiences and raises awareness of its renowned programme of artist residencies, retreats, exhibitions, educational events, and support for artists, arts professionals and the wider community.
The new dynamic and engaging design uses horizontal scrolling pages with arrows at the edges to tempt users with more content and encourage them to interact with the site. This unconventional approach allows Wysing to showcase larger images and video of artists’ work and other activities, while also adding a timeline and multi-layered dimension to several key pages. The new site has been built with an easy-to-use, highly flexible content management system enabling Wysing staff to quickly add new images, text and pages.
Wysing’s new website allows large images and videos of artists’ work to be showcased
“We have so many different programmes running throughout the year at Wysing – from intensive retreats and residencies, to large-scale gallery exhibitions, right through to new outdoor commissions across our site. And that’s before we even talk about all the work we do off-site and within our many external partnerships.
“It was difficult to see how a website could rationalise all this activity and transform it into something readable and understandable. But Silk Pearce has more than delivered and given us a new easy to use website that really does bring all our activities together in an engaging format,” said Donna Lynas, director, Wysing Arts Centre.
Ian Coote, designer at Silk Pearce added, “The nature of Wysing’s website redesign was complex due to the wide range of information and features that had to be incorporated. But at Silk Pearce, we are experienced in handling website projects and were able to design an appealing and engaging website that fulfilled the client’s brief.”
Visitors to the new site can also listen to recent talks and events, sign up for e-bulletins or join the mailing list, review the Centre’s Facebook, Twitter and Flickr feeds, make a donation to support its work or visit the online shop.
View the full press release here
Reproduced with permission from the ‘
