Bank of England

I have just launched this website for the Bank of England. Being a truly unique organisation, it’s been a really interesting project to work on. Through meetings with the client we gained quite an insight in the culture of the organisation and, along with Emma (WD), I set out to architect the site to communicate the open, dynamic feel we uncovered under the austere exterior. Bringing forward the bank’s people as a human face talking about their experiences seemed to be the best way to acheive this. With the design, we had to strike the right balance of looking and feeling very modern, while still staying fairly safe and conservative, and I think the approach we’ve taken using design elements from banknotes has acheived that.

The site is content managed using WordPress. I chose the YUI CSS framework again for the templates and used Flash (ActionScript 3) for the video and interactive features. The video interviews (shot by Simon Drew of kaspar films) in particular are key to the experience and I worked them into a stylised Flash interface. I used JQuery to handle the alternative text for the video.