JP74 works on D&AD website

Lancashire-based digital consultancy JP74 is redesigning D&AD’s main website, following its work earlier this year on the organisation’s professional and student awards and archive sites.

JP74 was appointed to revamp D&AD’s digital offer about two years ago, after D&AD used its e-mail marketing software. The consultancy fought off competition from other suppliers of digital products also working with D&AD at the time, in an informal pitching process.

JP74 managing director Pete Walker describes the revamp as ‘a massive project’, which will see the site transformed from ‘just a repository for linking to its other sites’.

The main site will take up to two years to design and build. In the meantime, D&AD will take down its current main site at the end of January 2010, replacing it with a temporary site, also created by JP74.

‘The temporary website will be a full site, but we don’t want people to think that it is the finished thing,’ says Walker.

D&AD digital and information systems director James Toop adds that the website will evolve and be unveiled in phases. ‘We want the site to reflect all of D&AD’s activities, including the educational, membership and workshop aspects,’ says Toop. ‘We haven’t been in the digital space properly for a few years and the system was becoming unmanageable.’ The two awards sites launched in June.

The archive, which allows visitors to search for and view D&AD’s past award-winners, went live earlier this month. Eventually, D&AD hopes to have its entire archive of winners since 1963 digitised.