Project Overview
Lord Mayor’s Charitable Foundation (LMCF) is one of Melbourne’s longest serving philanthropic organisations, focusing particularly on social issues. The foundation’s ability to successfully raise funds makes them a dynamic contributor to the health and welfare of our community. In 2012, the foundation distributed $9.2 million to charitable agencies throughout Victoria.
LMCF recently went through a branding re-fresh with the team at Design Works resulting in a fantastic new look.
In order to convey LMCF’s value to the world of philanthropy, having a strong brand and strong assets is of paramount importance. The website is one of those assets and it will be viewed by a large number of users in the online space.
The new site has a number of new interactive features that did not previously exist, including: an image gallery, blog, latest news section, in our community grants microsite and a home page rotating banner.
Project Commissioner
Lord Mayor's Charitable Foundation
Project Creator
Team
Project Management - Dominique Barker
Design - Renee Chambers
Development - Sean Shi & Dylan McTaggart
Project Brief
The brief specified exactly what needed to be used from a design perspective. The petal shapes from the logo were to be used sparingly, and the digital library of stunning, large-scale photography, needed to be selected carefully to echo LMCF’s values, and engage the user appropriately.
With a modern branding strategy complete with a broad primary and secondary colour palette, we had a lot to work with. Each part of the ‘floral-inspired’ logo represented a different component of LMCF, to allow each part of the organisation to be easily identifiable. For example, the ‘Apply for Grants’ section is turquoise, while the ‘Giving’ section is gold and each of these colours are used throughout the affiliated section to promote a better user experience.
As well as a strong homepage concept, LMCF had a microsite that was to be launched throughout the year that sat within the main site, large imagery was used again here, with tactile buttons for the user to easily navigate to the required area.
Project Need
From a design perspective, content-heavy sites can be difficult to work with, and LMCF was no exception with almost 130 pages of content. Typically, the text often ends up dominating the site’s prime real estate areas. So the challenge is always keeping the client happy by accommodating their required content, without compromising the integrity of the design.
The ability to integrate such strong colours, and imagery can make the world of difference in terms of user engagement. And from that point of view, the most innovative part of this site is that our design team has demonstrated that they can accommodate a large amount of content (the homepage is a good example here) such as news feeds, videos, and a number of modules, to appeal to a wide demographic without making it look cluttered. This is thanks to the careful consideration and placement of some beautiful photography, supported by the strong branding integration.
The most obvious outcome is that text-heavy sites can still look beautiful and successfully integrate contemporary design trends.
Design Challenge
The main challenge was accommodating a huge amount of content (a lot of it was text as mentioned above), and also having the site up and ready for the client’s ‘flower day’ launch and microsite launch for ‘in our community grants’ six weeks later. We had a tight timeline, and 18 different templates needed to be cutup, as well as a number of functional components that needed to styled and developed.
It was important to have the site up for the launch and it needed to be free of defects to preserve the design and functionality. Luckily, everything went to plan, and although it involved a bit of back-and-forthing between the client and butterfly, but both launches went off without a hitch.
Sustainability
Butterfly is very proud of its sustainability policy. The following are particularly relevant to this entry.
Office move – Butterfly moved its head office from Port Melbourne to the Melbourne CBD to assist with the reduction of its carbon footprint. The new offices are fully accessible by public transport and we have taken more than ten cars off the road. A number of our clients are in the CBD, and on-foot transport to meetings is encouraged.
The daily commute - Butterfly urges its employees to bike or walk to work where they can, and provide shower facilities and bike racks. Our CEO and COO both walk, leading by example. Approximately 23% of the workforce currently walks to work, with 11.5 per cent riding bikes, less than 8 per cent ride motorbikes, and remaining staff members commute via public transport –not one of our staff members gets to work via private car.
Cloud computing - Cloud computing initiatives have allowed Butterfly to reduce their carbon footprint, as it saves on in-house climate control, which is required when running in-house servers. Cloud services are used for: email, accounting software, workflow software, project management tools and more.
Digital Experience - Website
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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