When I ran 72 dots, I designed the official Channel 4 website to complement Jamie’s hit programme, Jamie’s School Dinners which set the country talking about the standard of kid’s food in schools.
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Hors d’oeuvres
72 dots were at the centre of Jamie Oliver’s campaign to improve the nation’s school dinners.
In 2005, the TV series ‘Jamie’s School Dinners’ was commissioned by Channel 4 and we were asked to design the supporting website. The programmes, which followed Jamie as he started his campaign in the London Borough of Greenwich sparked a massive debate.
The brief was to create a site to enable, educate and inspire adults, parents and teachers to improve the standard of school dinners in the UK. The website provides a wealth of information which allows viewers to assess the standard of food being served in their school and then learn what steps to follow in order to action change.
Main course
The team members – Caroline Sutton (Producer), Julia Bard (Editor), Elizabeth Martyn (Writer) and 72 dots (Design) worked together to define the strategy, information architecture and features of the site. To increase the campaign’s penetration, we decided to create downloadable assets that could be used away from the computer. We created assets that viewers could print out and stick on their fridge doors. For example, the Do Something! action pack was aimed at parents and guardians who may wish to start campaigning at their own children’s schools or just improve their child’s diet at home.
From a design perspective, the challenge was to not only to convey a lot of information but do so in easily-digestabe chunks. We were aware that the primary audience were busy people and that the proportion of our audience who would benefit most from the information may also have literacy issues. In response to this we sought to add lots of level headings and provide clear navigational paths to content. For example, we used numbering in the Do Something section to signpost the order of events.
We also wanted to offer some cool stuff to our secondary audience, the kidz! We recognised that they probably wouldn’t want to read all the healthy stuff so we sought to tell the story in a completely different way. Food Most Fowl (designed in conjunction with motion graphic partner Keith Robinson) is a cartoon horror spoof on junk food and has been praised by users of the site and several schools have shown it in their school assemblies.
The dessert
The success of the website and the campaign was phenomenal to say the least. The forum on the site was one of the first places viewers visited to discuss their thoughts on the issue, making it one of Channel 4′s busiest ever.
Jamie has also held two webchats on the site after the broadcast of his shows. The first one was so popular, he agreed to do another the week after, even though he was on a ski-ing trip. He also gave an exclusive interview for the site, alongside his dinner lady sidekick Nora Sands.
In March 2005, not long after the series began, the Government announced a £280 million investment of cash to improve school meals.
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What 72 dots were among the first to notice is that great design is not a decorative add-on but essential to your content. They do the simple stuff brilliantly, and the brilliant stuff simply. Can’t recommend them highly enough.