The client
In 2021, UCL (University College London) Department of Information Studies celebrated its centenary. Entitled ‘Geographies of Information’, a physical exhibition had been planned but would not have been possible during the Covid pandemic, so the decision was made to produce a virtual exhibition, which had the added advantage of being accessible worldwide.
The centrepiece of the website was a timeline (an extract is shown above) that marked the most significant events during the hundred years, from its foundation to recent developments in digital technology.
The brief
There was no written brief; rather a verbal request to design a ‘simple one page website’ quickly turned into a large and completely bespoke site.
It was challenging with a very tight timeline and budget. I worked closely with a WordPress developer and together we collaborated to find a way to present the various facets of the centenary that the department wished to be covered in the site.
Target audience
The target audience was primarily alumni of the Department of Information Studies, as well as the wider university’s audience, staff, former and present, and people interested in the area of librarianship.
Look and feel
The website would sit within and be accessed from, the main UCL website, so the design had to adhere to the university’s brand guidelines; primarily using black and white with Helvetica Neue their corporate typeface.
That provided a fairly narrow framework, but the features of the website promised to provide interesting and varied imagery, including a 3D tour of the exhibition, shown left. The 3D tour included visualization and interaction with digital files in the form of text, photos of UCL’s South Cloister space, where the exhibition was originally planned to take place, archive documents from UCL Special Collections, documents from the British Library and other archive repositories, oral history files created by UCL students, and sound compositions.
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