Client: Doing it for Dylan
The Brief
Doing it for Dylan is a water safety campaign created by Rebecca Ramsay. Her son Dylan, unfortunately, passed away in 2011 whilst swimming in a quarry in Chorley. Since then, she focuses on speaking about water safety and the hazards surrounding water to local schools and events.
As DIFD didn’t have any online presence, she had to go to schools to organise events. This is why Becky needed a website to not only tell the story of Dylan, but have a contact place for others to get in touch. Working with our graphic designer – Slawa Rusin – Becky was able to build a digital persona to represent the Doing it for Dylan brand.
Alongside the website, Rebecca wanted some graphics creating surrounding mascots. In the end, she settled on two dogs, one would be young and careless – and the older dog would have more knowledge about the dangers of open water.
Strategy
As this website is focused on a campaign for water safety, we wanted it to be themed around water. This meant the colours, branding, and overall website style would have to reflect that. For the home page, we wanted it to have a clean, simple design with a minimal, fresh look.
This helps keep people find where they want to go easily, and keeps them on the site for much longer. In terms of aesthetics, the section separators for instance can be set to curved, or even have a wave effect to imitate open water. The header itself would consist of the dogs that Rebecca mentioned beside a lake.
Approach
Working with Rebecca, we came up with a homepage design using Adobe XD. Once this was approved, we began the building process and made sure everything was perfect. Navigation is easy with the menu bar dropdowns, and the search bar gives users a quick way to find what they’re looking for.
Each section within the homepage had a clean water-like separator, that helped make reading paragraphs of text far easier. It’s important to note that text alone will make the user switch off, but images can break up the text and add a more personable touch.
Rebecca already had a logo from her Facebook page, but unfortunately, it just wasn’t suitable on the site and looked very old fashioned and out of place. We redesigned the logo and gave it a more modern look to fit in with the website theme. Finally, we made sure there were lots of buttons and call-to-actions so users can easily find out more about a certain part of the site – including links to PDFs/blogs.
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