Kabul at Work
This website that I finished designing recently, is for my good friend stationed in Afghanistan, David Gill. It was clear from the beginning that it was to work like a dynamic library of photographs and interviews that David can upload with comfort, publishing these amazing stories to the world – without it looking too much like a blog.
Site is now live
His site www.kabulatwork.tv (which is now live) chronicles the lives at work for the thousands of the population of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital city, where life goes on, war or not. Its seriously, seriously worth checking out. The photographs only compare to the text, beautifully inspired and ripe for the study, this other world.
There will be updates every week, so far there are 15 characters in 10 chapters, ranging from Sport & Recreation to Magnates & Moguls.
There is an intention, I hear that there is a book in the making…
Early designs
The logo remained the same for a good while, I dabbled with a few different icons and layouts for the chapters, before settling on something a bit more ‘trim’ and changing the font to something slightly more legible than stencil. The look for the site was inspired by an early photograph that David showed me, of a battered road sign. The server had some issues when updating services, but I resurrected it from the ashes to give a better, crisper design the second time round.
Logo design
Chapter Icon designs
Each chapter had to be distinct when journeying the site. When looking at one character, it had to be clear which chapter they were from, and when the chapter was selected that all the characters were visible within that too. There are a few basic categorisation and ordering tools (such as keywords, or tags – which are used but only in the background to calculate similar characters/chapters), although content is still king, so the key is to ensure correct and apprpriate data entry (text & image/video).
As I was designing the online persona for the site, it made sense to also design the icons for the avatar inside the discussions, and icons for the social network sites that link to the identity of the project (Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, RSS etc)
