greg-wood.co.uk

Ben’s actually a very talented designer himself, which for a design agency can prove to be either a blessing or a pain in the arse. In this case, Ben and Andy (Ben’s expedition manager) gave us free reign over the design, which can be challenging, but they understood the potential of early sketches, mood boards and ideas, and the site design came together pretty quickly once the favoured direction had been approved.

For projects where the client specifies little or no direction regarding the design, I find it’s massively helpful to open Fireworks or Photoshop or whatever, and start chucking your source material in. Playing with typefaces, shapes, colours, etc, and saving each revision or direction as separate files gives you a load of varied mood boards from which to develop a more considered approach.

For this project we ended up developing rough designs from pretty much every direction you see above, and although the process was fairly time-consuming and often frustrating as each direction we tried didn’t seem to work, it finally clicked into place and we were able to present something that Ben & Andy loved. Cue a massive sigh of relief and a few well earned pints.

We spent last week developing the site using the ever-immortal Expression Engine, and Collison and Swinbrook managed to allow Ben to blog from the arctic using some offline forms, php/database trickery, a PDA and a satellite phone. How good is that? I’m really looking forward to the day Ben sends a journal entry directly from the North Pole.

Anyway, enough jibber jabber, head on over to north.bensaunders.com to check out the site to find out more about the expedition, and make sure to grab the journal RSS feed to follow Ben’s progress. Also be sure to check out Colly’s account of the project, it’s probably funnier and more articulate than this one.