Paul Daly Blog

Since what feels like forever the company I work for, GRP (Guy Robertson Partnership), has been working on a new design and build for, Highland Spring, a bottled water company based in Perthshire who happen to sponsor big names such as, Andy Murray (the Scottish tennis player who is currently ranked 3rd in the world). I am pleased to say though that as of the beginning of last week (18th May 2009) the site has officially gone live to the public.

The initial design process saw myself and Jamie (Senior Web Designer) collaborating with Karen (Senior Designer) and Iain (Creative Partner) to create a number of different ideas/routes for the sites overall look and feel. We narrowed it down 4 separate ideas, the names of which I can’t quite remember, although I do m mine was about the ‘Organic Land from which Highland Springs water is drawn’. I was very happy with my idea which was achieved by first creating an illustration of the ‘Ochil Hills’ (the area in Perthshire Highland Spring is based) and under the soil of the hills to try and show the process of the how the water is drawn from the land using different water colour brush strokes in Photoshop. The other 3 were nice too using clever ideas of mixing illustrations and photos of the land.

In the end Highland Spring went with Iain’s idea which revealed the hills through a window to the user, however, there were still many tweaks needed in order for it to work well on the web. So over the next month or so myself and Jamie worked on re-jigging the idea into a usable area for a user as well as creating stills of the different sub pages etc. There was much hold up with this though since Highland Spring were in the middle of re-branding meaning that a lot of the stills were sent back and forth because the new packaging was changing, which became very frustrating as it even happened once most of the coding was complete meaning I was slicing up PSD’s again late on.

On the coding side of things I collaborated with mostly Marc (Senior Developer) and sometimes Jim Jams (Developer) who would be taking my lovely (commented, indented & tidy) XHTML/CSS layouts and turning them into fancy (messy at times) content managed pages. This, as always, was a headache-less process with my CSS and JavaScript files always doing what I wanted them to first time obviously?! Actually it was for the most part except mainly for the range section within the Still and Sparkling water pages, which used the JqDock to imitate a Leopard desktop menu. This was acheived by following a tutorial I saw on Nettuts, however, this wasn’t so simple as the tutorial never worked properly in guess what? IE6! Therefore a bit of tweaking was required for it to work, so I was back and forth from my lovely work iMac and the rubbish test PC next to me in order to fix it. In the end though it worked perfectly so I was very happy as the Sparkling water page ended up being my favourite on the site because I love how the green of the bottle sits on the recylced paper background, they compliment each other great, in my opinion anyway.

Overall, everyone involved, either at GRP or Highland Spring, was very happy with the outcome of the site as am I. Visit the site and let me know what you think below.