Project Overview
The perception of town planning is often suits, ties and white tea with two sugars. The reality is a dynamic industry with expert teams contributing a huge difference to our everyday lives via livable cities and towns. BlocksGlobal rose to the challenge to change the perception with Melbourne-based Ratio Consulting.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Project Director: Rachel Goldsworthy
Creative Direction: Brad Smith
Design: Ben Shackleton & Chris Bottega
Front-end Development: Mike Barker, Joseph Pitt & Christian Klammer
Back-end Development: Nick Marfleet, Brent Chuang
Project Brief
Before launching into website design, BlocksGlobal worked closely with Ratio to establish their cultural and professional stand-point.
Who are we? A simple question not always contemplated. The results? We are a top-tier consultancy, we offer a confident and expert voice, we are dynamic, progressive and adaptable. Now we are getting somewhere. The Ratio website presence took on a mantra of 'think big .... be big'.
Our design team were inspired by the concept of grids, patterns and a constantly evolving landscape. From this the design took to life with site content transitioning and expanding to reveal deeper content and new articles adding to the 'block' stacking and repositioning older content.
To ensure a consistent tone of voice BlocksGlobal collaborated with copywriter Jill Pope to tailor-write content to work within the design, without compromising effective key-wording.
Project Need
The creation of a fully CMS-driven and responsive site design allows the site visitor to choose their own way. On the top level, content is kept minimal, however expanding blocks encourage further exploration in an almost play-like state to find out more. At no stage did we allow the industry perception to dictate the vision, rather take a fresh view to further encourage other clients in traditional industries to explore 'be big' approach.
The website has the ability to capture newsletter sign-ups, so to complement, we built an email layout that helps to keep Ratio's digital presence consistent when speaking to their people.
Design Challenge
Ratio Consulting are a dream client. Different minds and thinkings, however in a collaborative approach that allows a design team to push the limits and allow a non-standard approach to be considered and explored. Ratio's style of working allowed our team to encourage the move away from their existing logo and take a confident stand with the simple 'ratio' wordmark.
The grid based system also posed an exciting design challenge for a fully-responsive site. Allowing for a site with extensive transitional features to gracefully rescale to mobile without loosing the original vision was a main focus of the designer/developer think-tank sessions.
Sustainability
No trees fell as a result of the designing and building this website.
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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