A.N.D Website design update

Funded by Arts Council England, A New Direction connects children, young people and education with the best of arts and culture that the city has to offer.

Their mission is for all children and young people in London to have a great cultural education and the freedom to lead a creative life. After having developed their brand and website in 2012, we have recently completed a redesign of the UX, IA in order to make their rapidly expanding content easier to find and navigate.

AND’s content had expanded more than was anticipated and this excess was making it hard to navigate and filter for specific interests, something we needed to address in the overhaul of the site. In addition to this, the organisation is also more focused on events than they were in the past, so the site structure and functionality needed to reflect this change.

To create an elegant response to meet their requirements we:

• simplified the navigation hierarchy and made it easy to get to content

• tagged content using user relevant keywords to create multiple routes to relevant pages

• cleaned up the design, reducing clutter and micro-copy to simplify presentation

• improved mobile and tablet views with clearer layout

• enhanced brand through extended colour palette and new screen fonts

• simplified brand image styles to make better use of photos and make it easier for editors to add images