“Peoples Archive requires and rewards patient exploration, but there’s so much here to enjoy that even a brief visit will turn up some priceless nuggets. This site is for us, not just our descendants and the list continues to grow: future contributors will include Chomsky, le Carre and - at last, women! - Doris Lessing and Paula Rego.” The Observer, 20th May 2007
Peoples Archive, one of our latest clients, was discussed in The Observer’s Review section this weekend.

The journal has been very quiet of late, as we’ve been extraordinarily busy with our clients. That said, we have now released a small update to the Olivant website. This is the last update to this particular version of the site. The next version will be a major overhaul, including a new content management system and significant design evolution.

We’re looking for an ambitious junior designer and/or coder, who wants to work within a brand and user-centered design consultancy (that’s us). They will need at least one or more of the following characteristics…

• the aforementioned ambition
• be adept at CSS and XHTML (and comprehend Flash)
• be interested in current web and design trends
• be able to actually design
• be comfortable working within a team and with clients
• want to work in a fantastic office space in Hampstead, London

We’re interested in employing someone for initially a month’s work. If you’re this person, please contact us.

At long last we have launched the Skills Match section on the NHS Alchemy website. Skills Match is a carefully designed questionnaire that helps young people think about the kind of role they could play in the NHS. The results suggests three possibilities - from doctor to manager to the emergency services. Give it a whirl, and see what you could or might have been…

NHS Alchemy was built with our partner Zebra Crossing Creative Media.

We’re helping in the launch of the new book China Road by Rob Gifford, published by Random House. The website is at a very very early stage (more coming soon). Rob was NPR’s China Correspondent and the book is a description of a road trip around the less well known fringes, both geographically and culturally, of China. Photography for the book is by Patrick Fraser.

FoxLand has had a fantastic first 5 months. We’d like to thank all our clients, friends and anyone that has helped, advised or warned us. We’ve done a whole pile of work, had very little time to work on our website, met a load of great people and been generally surprised at how much has happened in such a short time. In particular we’d like to mention Provokateur, Daikin, Current Biodata, Zebra Crossing, Faculty of 1000, Olivant, Itochu, Attiva, NHS Alchemy, Macmillan Cancer Support, Spy Design, Fortismere School, Copper, Coochi, Olly Blackburn, Chloë Lederman, Fiona Campbell, SU, Martin Beckett, Scholz & Friends, Leslie Mello, Jack Dunning and anyone else we may have forgotten (apologies). Here’s to the next (already very busy) 12 months.

Happy Christmas from FoxLand… see you in the New Year.

Yesterday we launched version 1 of the Fortismere School Sixth Form website. The London-based state school required a clear way of advertising the sixth form as a seperate identity. It was designed to be clear, simple and accessible. We are still working on iterations of the site over the next few months, so things may change significantly - especially in terms of site architecture.

It was also imperative for it to be easy for the staff to update, and therefore uses a heavily tweaked version of Wordpress as a simple Content Management System. We have also used SIFR for the use of accessible dynamic custom fonts (used in the page headers).

We built the website in partnership with Zebra Crossing who also supplied the fantastic photography. We love using original photography!

Also of interest is this article on the creation of the original Fortismere identity at Brand Channel.

Daikin Industries Ltd are one of the world’s leading producers of air-conditioning and refrigeration systems. The Japanese company asked FoxLand to develop the website for their latest product - the Daikin Reefer Container Refrigeration machine. This unit maintains the internal temperature of cargo containers using the latest in Japanese technology and quality. So if you’re exporting frozen fish (as one does) from Iceland to Australia or bananas from the Philippines to Britain the Daikin Reefer will keep them fresh. The website went live today.

Copper, a new recruitment consultancy set up by Celia Brasher and Sonja Smithers, have launched their website at copperlondon.co.uk. We designed and created their identity and website.

Our latest project, the Blood Diamond Action website, has just gone live. The website publicises the issues surrounding the film Blood Diamond that stars Leonardo diCaprio amongst others. Working again with Provokateur, the site is backed by Amnesty International USA and Global Witness.

The build of the site was fine. However, our problem was determining the potential traffic to the site. The film will be launched in the US in December and the UK early next year. This will raise the profile of the issue greatly and with it the profile of the site. The potential number of visitors to the site globally could be quite large.

It’s always great to have lots of visitors to a website. But it is, of course, not as simple as that. The website is designed for broadband and includes a 9MB video download. The main Flash-based element is approximately 190k. While these are not enormous files, a large number of global visitors could cause it problems. Even if the majority of visitors don’t download the video, the required bandwidth could become very costly and a surge in visitor numbers could even bring it down.

Our solution to this was to move all the key files to Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service), part of Amazon Web Services. Amazon Web Services use infrastructure that Amazon has already set up for their own products, and are now offering to other companies. Therefore, not only are we tapping into a very reliable system that one of the largest web companies in the world is using, it is also easy to use, very cheap and you only pay for what is used. So if a large number of people visit the site or the expected visitors don’t arrive, it won’t be a problem.

Update: The website is featured in an article in today’s LA Times (16th November 2006).

This article was edited, and moved to another post.

The Spurt campaign, which we built the website for, is Pick of the Month in November’s Creative Review magazine, the world’s leading monthly magazine for visual communication. Working with Provokateur, the website backed up a press ad alerting readers to a spoof pro-aviation growth organisation, Spurt. Featuring bogus airline big-wig Sir Montgomery Cecil, the ad urged readers to ignore the tree hugging lobby with the motto “Sod them. Let’s fly”. Only when readers visit the site is it revealed that the ad was organised by a coalition of environmentalist groups including Enoughsenough.org, Airportwatch and Greenpeace.

Take a look at the Unlimited Spurt website we built, a satirical website aimed at the worst excesses of the aviation industry, backed-up by a national UK newspaper campaign. Working with Provokateur, the campaign is being supported by Greenpeace, Airportwatch and EnoughsEnough.org.

Update: Take a look at the Daily Mirror article, an article in The Times, the Digg article and the comments on YouTube.

The new Olivant site has launched today, with help from Wolff Olins. Olivant is a financial services business created by Luqman Arnold (previously CEO of Abbey) and Alan Morgan.