The brief
We were commissioned to re-design an existing site for Channel 4 which was made entirely in Flash. Part of the brief was also to look at the overall architecture of the site: make it easier to find things; group the content so it was in a more logical order and create clear user-journeys across pages.
The existing website was produced completely in Flash and so was not search engine friendly. A lot had changed at the channel (E4, More 4 and 4OD had come online) since the website was released, so Channel 4 commissioned some new content from Available light to bring the story up to date. Stylistically, it was all looking a little tired too.
We were also asked to port the new site into Channel 4’s content management system so it could be updated easily.
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.
Darren Pangbourne, Editor, New Media Factual (History), Channel 4
Design challenges
The brief specified that we had to re-use the existing flash games which had been extracted from the original site. This posed the crucial design challenge – how to marry the new site design (modern, reflecting current branding guidelines and ‘on-message’) with legacy content executed in a completely different style?
An aspect of having to use the channel’s CMS was that the templates come with a fixed-with vertical navigation area down the left-hand side. Many of the legacy flash games utilised the full width of the screen so we had to design the new site with this very much in mind. The answer to this question was to scale the flash movies down in the HTML rather than re-engineer them so that the navigation could fit too. A simple answer, but it resolved the issue. We also set the background colours of the flash games to be transparent so they would merge more sympathetically with the new design.
Other challenges lay in making the old-school site standards-compliant; we introduced a CSS-based layout (data tables were marked up properly for increased accessibility) and employed some DOM-scripting to recreate the rich functionality that was present in the flash version.
The Outcome
The new design is much more than a lick of paint. Channel 4’s brand identity is fully expressed and the uncluttured approach makes the content much more clearer.
By grouping content more logically and (crucially) renaming section titles so they are more explanatory makes content easier to find. Re-ordering navigation items to delineate the information hierarchy gives context and meaning to end-users. You can find things, you can see what there at a glance. In our opinion, the website is a much more enjoyable and rewarding experience for the viewer.
Why? Firstly, it’s a big pot of cash (although smaller than we hoped). It’s a new funding model for C4, where, instead of commissioning projects, it supports them with equity investment. It reaches out to everyone, not just an elite of programme makers. And finally, it’s asking for completely new kinds of ideas, the kind that it’s hard even to associate with a television channel.
Matt Locke
My first inkling of the fund was when I spoke to Matt Locke soon after he had joined Channel 4. He had been appointed to the Education Dept, which was frustrated that it had been making good programmes for teenagers which they didn’t watch. Matt explained that they were abandoning TV and putting the whole budget into online.
— The whole lot? I said.
— Yes, he said. We’ve got six million pounds.
This seemed extraordinarily bold. I quickly started to think how we could help him spend it.
— So you’d like ideas?
— Lots of them, he said.
— For the website?
He looked disparaging.
— We want to go where people are, he said. Facebook, IM, text. We want to engage them. We want to touch their lives.
— With a nice Channel 4 logo? I said, helpfully.
— No, he said. Not Channel 4 branded. Under the radar. Cultural interventions.
This blew my mind. Channel 4 is an institution which brands everything it touches. Only The Guardian has been greedier in annexing our culture to its brand. And now it was going anonymous? With “cultural interventions”? Not programmes? Not informational websites? Not even ‘360 programming’?
Here was a channel which had been founded to explore minority interests and experimental television, and had ended up twenty years later sticking a C4 logo on Desperate Housewives. Channel 4’s journey has been a strange one, and in some ways a story of the times. This was a real twist in the tale.
Tornados and Power-ups
Matt gave examples of the kind of projects he admired, like World Without Oil. I started to understand what he meant. WWO was an online game which simulated the beginnings of a global oil crisis. Americans playing the game visited the website to see video reports of the crisis developing, and then reported back on how it was affecting their lives. It was a consensual hallucination.
Over 1900 people signed up as players of World Without Oil, and submitted over 1500 stories from inside the “global oil crisis of 2007.” Their work comprises a rich, complex, and eerily plausible collective imagining of such an event, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually happening.
What a great idea! And it offers its own possible future, one where we use simulation to understand the complexity of the world, where we learn through engagement, where storytelling and action allow us to feel problems as well as understand them.
For these people and over 60,000 active observers, the process of collectively imagining and collaboratively chronicling the oil shock brought strong insight about oil dependency and energy policy. More than mere “raising awareness,” WWO made the issues real, and this in turn led to real engagement and real change in people’s lives.
This was what Matt wanted. I wanted it too — certainly more than I wanted Desperate Housewives. It felt like Channel 4 was returning to its original values, and yet taking a direction which could see its original role entirely disappear.
Public service publishing
And now we have 4IP, which from where I’m standing, is this vision given weight. The Education and New Media Dept have kicked off some very interesting projects in the past twelve months, but 4IP is a national statement.
The question is — will it stick? Or will it be like Dragon’s Den, where a few ideas get a wave of the wad, and even those get mired in due diligence and funding hassles. Our first contact with Matt was through the BBC Innovation Lab, a thoroughly exciting initiative in the same mould as 4IP. But for many of us, the promise outstripped the reality as our projects became stranded in development hell. It’s really hard to nurture ideas, and if the executive and marketing-led interference which has characterised C4’s approach to TV development is placed on Tom Loosemore at 4IP, then I suspect he’ll soon be moving on.
I really hope not, and I really hope the fund flourishes and scatters “power-ups” and “tornados” (Matt’s words) across our cultural landscape. But to be frank, I don’t think Channel 4 has the guts to follow it through. The organisation is under pressure — ad budgets are dramatically shrinking — and when it’s under pressure an organisation resorts to old habits. So expect to see pressure on the fund for big hits, for brand awareness, for reach among its target demographics. And when that happens, Tom and Matt will walk, as they walked from the BBC before.
To be continued
Would that be an unhappy ending? For Channel 4, yes. Because it will have lost a rare opportunity to reinvent itself into a unique 21C cultural institution. Creating a genuinely supportive culture of innovation is hard, and to succeed it needs to run through an organisation like letters through rock. The innovators have been brought in, but I think this vision is their vision, and it’s for Channel 4 to do the hard thing and make it theirs too.
