Like a garden left unattended, the Canadian Bible Society site had overrun its intended structure and scale. Pages had become overstretched and it was obvious – to viewers and administrators alike – that a change was in order.
When Canadian Bible Society approached Riordon Design early in 2009 with the goal of crafting a more concise and disciplined online presentation, Riordon partnered with Pear for site planning and design. Our two firms worked in tandem to define a new extensible content architecture which allowed for substantial growth but provided a controlled environment and framework for making appropriate editorial choices. The resulting platform is inclusive of a greater variety of media types – video, audio and motion graphics. Where these components had been awkwardly slotted into the legacy structure, they now have a logical home and consistent presentation.
Our design contribution to the site is the first large-scale visual articulation of organization’s newly adopted brand architecture (also provided by Riordon Design). Consisting of no less than 24 unique page types, this system is one of the most comprehensive we’ve completed for any client project. In comparison to its predecessor, it is a clearly navigable presentation with numerous visual cues to support user-orientation.
Typography is the cornerstone of our design solution. Working exclusively with available system fonts, we developed an elegant and extensible visual vocabulary – one capable of adapting to a continually evolving body of content.
The presentation-layer design was implemented as W3C compliant code by Pear partner Webstructure for delivery to U.S. developer HiDef for integration into a Drupal-based CMS framework. This is a platform chosen to support multiple contributors and significant interchange between administrative team members.
