Creative direction, branding, design & build of an environmental conference website

Project

The Global Wave Conference is an environmental conference, hosted (this year) by UK charity, Surfers Against Sewage (SAS). This is the 4th installment of the conference. I was tasked with a re-brand, new creative direction and a website design and build, to present the conference themes, speakers, agenda, and visually incorporate the host destination of Cornwall, UK. I’m the Digital Rep at SAS, and this is the fifth website I have designed/built for them. This was a freelance project, essentially a personal project, given that I worked on it in the evenings and weekends, outside of my full-time job.

Design

The nice thing about a project like this is that I have total creative freedom, so I attempted a little more unorthodox UI. I had fun with it! I initially came up with some more ‘off-the-wall’ creative direction and design experiments, earlier in 2014, so SAS had some visuals to go out with and talk to partners/sponsors, and get them excited about the conference. I later refined these ideas into the live project you see here.

Involvement

Creative director
Brand
Design
Front and back-end build

Client

Surfers Against Sewage

Date

2015

Honours

Nominated at the Pixel Awards

Credits

Photos by Karl Mackie
Logo animation by David Urbinati

Wave animation

I wanted some movement in the design, and given the waves theme of the conference, it seemed a natural choice to have an animated wave, which made up the brand mark. The wave animation was created by David Urbanati.

Detail

Close-up of the design details.

Navigation / menu

A fullscreen navigation panel, when opened, pushes all other content off-screen, dividing focus between content and navigation in their own distinct, distraction free environment — I wanted to focus on the content, with a clean, easy to read, clutter-free UI.

Agenda

Full breakdown of the 4 days of the conference, with times and details of speakers and themes being presented, with links to speaker bios.

Speaker template

Introducing conference speakers. The focus is squarely on the content.

Theme template

Introducing the key themes/areas covered at the conference.

Partner template

Introducing the partner organisations of the conference. An optional gallery at the foot gives the opportunity to showcase the environmental partners' campaigns.