The Startup Awards

I’d already worked with Stephen from Startups.ie to create the Startups logo.

I was delighted when he asked me to design the Startup Awards website as it was something very different and a great idea for businesses in Ireland.

The awards main sponsor is Vodafone so the site design had to match in with the Vodafone brand. I spent a lot of time going through Vodafone business brochures and their websites. Their approach towards business customers is slightly different than the personal market. Since the awards are aimed purely at startup business it was important that we followed the same approach.

The site uses very solid colours and marries the Startups green with the Vodafone red in a nice way. Both brands had to be prominent whilsts not competing with each other. For areas of interest and links the colors would primarily be a variation of the Startups green. When users hover their mouse over links in the main content the links use a variation of the Vodafone red.

There’s some simple humor added into the error page people get if they type in the wrong address on the site. It is important that when something wrong happens you make people feel better so with some humor and making someone smile they will forgive an error on the site and are more likely to continue to try navigate to where they want to go rather than get frustrated and leave. You can see the error page on the 5th slide above.

The site is coded in HTML5 with splashes of CSS3 were possible. The backend uses WordPress which means the content on the site can be full edited by Startups themselves. I used Googles free translation plugin to provide complete translation of the site into Irish without anyone needing to actually create Irish versions of each page.