Clearleft designs Channel Four Scrapbook website

The consultancy worked alongside the channel’s in-house technical team, which built the site, and consultancy Thought Works, which worked on back-end design.

Scrapbook draws together lifestyle tips, recipes and suggestions from a team of Channel Four personalities such as Jamie Oliver, Kevin McLeod, Dr Christian Jessen and Mary Portas. Users can browse these contributors’ own Scrapbooks, collating them in their own Scrapbook page, and can also add elements from other external sites.

Clearleft began working on the project in summer 2011, having been appointed without a pitch on the strength of previous work with Channel Four.

James Box, user experience designer at Channel Four, says, ‘People using the site start their journey with TV – it’s for people who might be unfamiliar or put off with technology and things like the “share on Twitter” button. We spent a lot of time trying to hone it to make it easy to use for those sort of people.’

The site design draws on elements of the More4 sub brand, tying in with the recent relaunch of More4 to focus more on lifestyle programming. It uses the bespoke More4 typeface with a colour palette that aims to highlight the site’s user-friendly, non-technical nature.

Box says, ‘We wanted to use an instantly recognisable metaphor [Scrapbook.] It’s got a strong relationship with More4 so we’re applying that visual language but also making sure it could scale up with Channel 4 so it has some visual resonance with that, like the watermark at the top.

‘There’s an analogue nature that makes people feel like it’s not something overly technical, so the palette revolves around that. A lot of the programmes are skewed towards women but we still didn’t want it to feel inaccessible to men.’