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News Pro Helvetia Compass open to the public
Donnerstag, April 23, 2009 at 10:43AM
Our longest-running project has finally come out into the light: It's called Pro Helvetia Compass, and it is an arts promotion platform.
Pro Helvetia is a state subsidized foundation who's core mission is to support and promote swiss arts, mainly abroad. Compass is now presenting these projects on the web. The first visitors were people in diplomatic functions - the platform should help them to incorporate swiss culture when they're organizing events in their host country. Now the platform is accessible to the public and hopefully helps promoting the work of swiss artists.
The visuals are inspired by a carousel. The carousel turns once an hour by one slot, so that each project has about equal time on the front page. This is important because 'featuring' one project more than another would go against the foundations' values.
An interesting aspect of the work with Pro Helvetia was to bring some agility to the process there. Creating pretty project descriptions for dozens or hundreds of projects would have been quite a load on the foundation. So we created a process for project owners to contribute to their entry. To alleviate fears that entries get destroyed by external contributors, we included a versioning solution, so that nothing is lost when changes happen. That way the company felt save enough to let external contributors to edit content without restricting per-field rights management. A project passes half a dozen stages including translation and review before a description goes life. The platform profits from the work the project owners put into it, which raises the quality of the pages and causes less work for Pro Helvetia.
The graphic design was done by jonadesign, and it contributes a lot to the attraction of the site. As usual in Switzerland, the application had to be multilingual and do its best to promote the projects in the users' language, if available, and otherwise make smart guesses. Combine that with multiple language-dependent attachments, file uploads and the versioning mentioned above and you got a nice puzzle to solve.
But this is what we're all about. Finding solutions to complex problems so that in the end everything looks fairly simple.
Pro Helvetia is a state subsidized foundation who's core mission is to support and promote swiss arts, mainly abroad. Compass is now presenting these projects on the web. The first visitors were people in diplomatic functions - the platform should help them to incorporate swiss culture when they're organizing events in their host country. Now the platform is accessible to the public and hopefully helps promoting the work of swiss artists.
The visuals are inspired by a carousel. The carousel turns once an hour by one slot, so that each project has about equal time on the front page. This is important because 'featuring' one project more than another would go against the foundations' values.
An interesting aspect of the work with Pro Helvetia was to bring some agility to the process there. Creating pretty project descriptions for dozens or hundreds of projects would have been quite a load on the foundation. So we created a process for project owners to contribute to their entry. To alleviate fears that entries get destroyed by external contributors, we included a versioning solution, so that nothing is lost when changes happen. That way the company felt save enough to let external contributors to edit content without restricting per-field rights management. A project passes half a dozen stages including translation and review before a description goes life. The platform profits from the work the project owners put into it, which raises the quality of the pages and causes less work for Pro Helvetia.
The graphic design was done by jonadesign, and it contributes a lot to the attraction of the site. As usual in Switzerland, the application had to be multilingual and do its best to promote the projects in the users' language, if available, and otherwise make smart guesses. Combine that with multiple language-dependent attachments, file uploads and the versioning mentioned above and you got a nice puzzle to solve.
But this is what we're all about. Finding solutions to complex problems so that in the end everything looks fairly simple.
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