digital workbook
My team has captured some photos to feature on our website, ideally we would have got actual ex serviceman for our photos but this was very hard to contact and arrange in such a short turnaround. Although we have captured photos at a fundraising event, horse guards parade, photos of a soldier and studio shots of the positives that help for heroes can provide.
In this day and age social media is a big part of every business, it enables the chance to showcase to a much larger audience and engage with them. This is why my team have come up with some social media campaigns that would help us reach out to a wider audience.
With the help for heroes brand we have identified that their website is not very functional and inviting. On first impressions there is nothing inviting about it and it looks pretty complex. For this reason we are going to modernise it completely so it is more inviting, easier to navigate and simpler.
We considered rebranding them completely but we realised their logo is quite recognisable and that this would be a silly decision, for this reason we have just modernised their logo slightly, edited the typography and changed the tagline.
Our aim is to reach out to a wider audience because we believe most of it appeals to an older audience. We want to creat a more emotional and engaging brand that maintains relevant and contemporary among it’s competition such as The British Leigon.
We made a survey and got people from the public to complete it to help us improve help for heroes. The feedback helped us.
Within the photography team we are going to split up and aim to create different things for the website, these will feature an event, a story of ex serviceman and woman’s family, and a real ex serviceman if we can contact one in time. Along with all of this we are also going to try and create some video content for the website, this is very beneficial because it brings more engagement to the website as it is embedded. I am going to attempt to contact an ex service person to photograph, i feel this will be a hard task to do in the short time we have but if it works it will be very beneficial for the website because I can create a real story.
Continuing from our brief, my group was assigned with the company Help for Heroes. This is a charity launched in October 2007 that works towards helping ex British servicemen and woman that have been injuring doing conflict. In my opinion this is quite a hard company to make interesting and different content for that hasn’t been done before. This is because it can be quite a sensitive subject and if we were to attempt to do a good project on it we would prefer to contact and shoot an ex serviceman or woman. But this is not easy with the time limit we have of 2 weeks. This may lead to shooting someone that acts as an ex serviceman who was injured in the line of duty. Although we can also shoot an event to add to the website, but of course help for heroes already has lots of photos from events.
On the design side, there is a lot that can be improved such as the help for heroes website. It could be made more interactive to increase engagement as I feel there is a lot of text and stories/photos that look similar. It comes across as very boring and repetivitve.
The logo for help for heroes is also something that can also be updated. It seems a bit dated and too much for a logo. A logo should be simple and effective with not too much text, this is the opposite. There is too much text which is also accompanied by an image, the font is also a bit old fashioned. This could be improved very easily, even running with the idea of the medal and scrapping the text alongside would make a huge difference, also altering the typography.
Today we received our first brief for the creative collaboration class of our 2nd year course, here is the brief.
Collaborating with the web design students we have to create completely new content for a company and also rebrand them. This will be done by creating a new website, photos, video and branding. As I am a photography student I will be working towards creating new photos or video for the website.
André Jacques