I've been involved with a really exciting project over the past few weeks which is starting to come into fruition now and I wanted to mention it here quickly.
Race: Science's Last Taboo is a season running over the next few weeks exploring the history and myths in science's justification of racism. As the season has been commissioned as a factual and scientific set of programmes, the producers wanted to include a lot of educational and contextual content in the season's online presence, so Public Zone have been working with them on this.
It was really interesting to work with the Channel 4 brand and across two platforms - the custom bits that we designed and built here, and the bits that come with every Channel 4 show and have a set template. The necessity to clearly highlight the different areas of the minisite, whilst maintaining a consistent user journey was challenging but I think we did a really good job. Right now there's only a small version of the site available online, but as the programmes transmit there will be new articles, clips and pages available.
I think the element that we're most proud of as a team though, is the 'definition tool' conceived in the early stage of the project.
In essence it's a fairly simple comment tool - but with a twist. We wanted to make it a gateway to all the content that would be on the site, rather than an end in itself. As the season highlights, it is very problematic to define race at all, because you immediately start establishing terms of differentiation which could be discriminatory to one group or another. So by asking visitors to the site to define race right at the outset, we wanted to give people the opportunity to then explore the content with a greater sense of purpose. In many ways the definition tool sums up the season.
It's still quite interesting reading what people have said when they have tried to answer it though. Why don't you have a go?
It's been a really great project to have been involved with, with lovely clients and a very committed core team here at PZ. It's also been a great chance for me on a design level to work with such a great brand identity.
