A Little Dust-off; The Journey To Brilliance

Dur­ing my final year of stud­ies, I had the oppor­tu­nity to design a few web­sites in real-world sit­u­a­tions, one of them couldn’t be more real— The Jour­ney To Bril­liance. Bruce McIn­tyre, my for­mer employer years ago at Mac­pac Wilder­ness approached me and intro­duced me to his past project he’d been slowly work­ing on for the last decade. The ulti­mate aim of J2B was to reform edu­ca­tion. At first I was quite lost and ‘wowed’ by the state­ment, the web­site would ini­tially have no tan­gi­ble prod­uct or ser­vice to sell—it was an idea, and as it turns out, a really good idea.

Today J2B runs in the back­ground of an active edu­ca­tion cen­tre in Christchurch by the name of Seven Oaks. Seven Oaks show­cases edu­ca­tion in it’s peak form, enlight­en­ing a small but grow­ing num­ber pri­mary school aged Chil­dren. Although still only early days, the cen­tre is pro­vid­ing great results and very pos­i­tive feed­back from parents.

In need of an update, J2B also needed to reflect the activ­ity and hard work going on at Seven Oaks. A shuf­fle of the menu, some sub­tle but effec­tive use of back­ground graphic ele­ments, the addi­tion of Unify to allow Bruce and the team to update con­tent, and most impor­tantly, a vigourous mas­sage of the typography.

As J2B is pri­mar­ily type-based, I stuck with a ser­ifed type­face, a lim­ited line length, jus­ti­fied align­ment and a nice amount of spac­ing in between the lines (line height or lead­ing). All of these fea­tures allow for a more flu­ent, eas­ier read.

I also went with Unify for a con­tent edi­tor as I’ve used since they began test­ing it back in 2008, and I’ve found it to be the most well designed, sim­ple, and effi­cient way of updat­ing page content.

View Jour­ney To Bril­liance in action here.