Cogapp to redesign BFI website

The consultancy will ’rethink user experience’, according to BFI digital director Paula Le Dieu, who believes the current sites are ’deceptively large’. Cogapp was one of five shortlisted consultancies to come through a pre-qualification questionnaire stage before winning the contract.

Rachel Rainbow, production director at Cogapp, says when the new site goes live in October, it will make better use of the archive, which manyvisitors believe is a lending library. She says, ’It’s not a repository, it’s a curated collection.’

The new site – which must appeal to a broader audience, particularly younger people – will also have to represent the brands of the London Film Festival and the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Rainbow is currently leading an ’iterative approach’ and will explore several design routes further after completing user research, which is currently underway.

It is undecided whether www.bfi.org.uk and www.screenonline.org.uk will merge or be replaced. The consultancy is also looking into how mobile devices can be a part of the design solution, but says the project is still at a very exploratory stage.

Two sets of documentary films, entitled Designs For Today, have been re-released by the BFI. Both are from the Central Office of Information’s collection, and the second, released in March, includes Brief City (1952), which looks at modern architecture and the Festival of Britain; Insight: Terence Conran (1981); and Designing Women (1948), voiced by Joyce Grenfell.