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• Site goes live for CRD

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Cogapp is pleased to announce that the re-designed and developed website for the Centre for Research and Development (CRD) at the University of Brighton has gone live.

CRD, the department that supports staff research and collaborative research projects in the Faculty of Arts and Architecture, wanted to bring their existing web presence up to date so as to allow them to show the wide-ranging research going on inside the faculty.

Following on from a competitive tender process in March 2007, Cogapp undertook an intensive branding exercise in conjunction with key figures in CRD and the University. The final identity revolves around the ‘R’ of CRD, standing for Research, with the font used for the ‘R’ changing across different collateral and web pages. Seven fonts were chosen collaboratively with the project team at CRD for their significance in design history, reflecting the importance and diversity of research in arts and architecture at the University of Brighton.

The website development began in tandem with user-testing of the existing CRD site at our in-house usability studio, observed by the CRD project team. The user goals established in this phase informed the development of Information Architecture wireframes and later a prototype. This went through a number of rounds of user testing, the last of which looked at users’ understanding of side-widgets, contextual navigation and information findability, again observed by the CRD development team.

Professor Jonathan M. Woodham, Director of CRD commented: “Working with Cogapp has been a highly beneficial experience. We learnt, through observation of user testing, just what was missing from our old research website and, working with the young and flexible Cogapp team, have been provided with an excellent, original and efficient design solution that signals the imaginative research ethos that we required”.