ChilliBean

Website

ChilliBean are a media asset management company, with unrivaled expertise in the storage, transcoding, organisation and delivery of rich media across a global infrastructure. I worked at ChilliBean for a year, as part of an industry placement for my degree. During my year at ChilliBean I was involved in a number of projects as both a developer and as a graphic designer.

I initially worked on the new design of the ChilliBean website as a developer, but was asked to completely re-design the website to reflect the re-branding which I had been developing for the company. The original ChilliBean website had focused on using the yellows and reds from the logo as the main colour scheme for the body of the website. I felt this approach was too heavy, as the strong colours made the design feel uncomfortable. Drawing inspiration from the neutral greys used for the office front, I created a new design which put focus on the ChilliBean logo, the branding of the company. The use of neutral greys enabled the design to become more balanced, and less jarring to the viewer. As a result, the content is more readable to the user.

Some feedback from the previous versions of the ChilliBean website indicated that users didn’t understand exactly what services ChilliBean offered. This was a key requirement for the re-design, as the company relied on people using their services. The home page now uses a featured content scroller to instantly draw attention to the main services ChilliBean provide, and a services section provides more detailed information about each service in turn.

The other important requirement for the re-design, which was derived from direct feedback from our clients was a blog. Often the development team would be working hard to fix bugs, or implementing new features but the clients had no way of seeing the progression of this work. By using WordPress and a custom skin to incorporate it into the re-design, I developed a development blog for the ChilliBean development team to communicate with the public about the exciting developments within the company.

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