BBC R&D

Working as an integral part of the BBC’s own production team to deliver design guidelines.

Milo were approached by BBC R&D to pitch for the redesign of the R&D website. The client required a new approach to the organisation of the content and a distinct look and feel for their service. As well as featuring details of current and archived R&D projects, the site needed to be an easily navigable repository for thousands of documents, brochures and white papers from the last 50 years.

Website design and definition for BBC Research and Development.

We followed a process of user centred design to build up a series of personas to ensure that all potential users requirements could be tested against, making sure that they could all find their way to their desired content in the simplest way possible.

Milo worked as an integral part of the BBC’s own production team to apply our designs and architecture to their Topcat2 content management system. The final outcome of this project was a full design document containing guidelines for user interaction, information architecture, entity relationships, user interfaces and design.

The site launched in February 2010 and the recently launched BBC R&D blog borrows design and layout elements from the website and together they form a more open ‘front door’ to BBC Research and Development.

AVATAR-m

AVATAR-m is a development project between the BBC and four other technology and storage partners:

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AVATAR-m is a collaborative R&D project which aims to address the issues associated with massive (exabyte sized) data and degradation of archives. It aims to bridge the gap between archiving as a long-term preservation activity and the day-to-day business role that archives have as working repositories of an organisation’s most valued assets.

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Our role was to create a promotional website, for use at broadcasting conferences NAB in Las Vegas and IBC in Amsterdam, to update interested parties with information and documentation about the progress and development of the AVATAR-m project. We offered a full branding solution to the client, incorporating logo design, web, print and display design.

We built a Wordpress based website that enabled the client to take full control of publishing content over the course of these conferences. The branding ideas came from a series of interviews we did with the consortium partners while visiting their labs and seeing the prototype technology.

In addition to this we produced a promotional film that enabled all of the consortium partners to highlight their involvement in the project and explain the potential benefits of AVATAR-m to the broadcast industry.

Avatar-M Promo film, NAB 2009 from Ant Miller on Vimeo.

 

We filmed the promo at BBC R&D’s Kingswood Warren chromat studio and combined this with some motion graphics and graphic design that pulled together the film and the print and web design.