Mercy Breastmilk Bank

Mercy Breastmilk Bank

• Flint Interactive

• User Generated Content
• Low Budget

It must be hard being a charity and have the budget for the perfect website. Lucky for them, we had a clever designer and technical director on the case. Cam, the tech, devised a plan on limiting the functionality of the CMS, to cut down the budget. The result was the client had to do a bit more work, but the user wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The freelance designer's design allowed for simple animations and transitions, which also aided the low budget execution.

The designer and I never got to jam on the execution, but he definitely "got" the situation and played his part very well. I only have praise for him, as he must have thoroughly understood the brief. This only really comes from digital design experience.

There are still too many designers that think they "get" the brief and design something that needs double the budget to develop. This is why I'm a strong believer of solid meetings between the developers and designers involved to plan the solution together, over the current linear designer first, developer later methodology. The outcome of this meeting should be then approved by the creative director. Benefits of this include:

- better understanding of each other's abilities
- stronger teamwork
- the CD's involvement is strictly directional
- discussion for a combined optimum solution

• Flash w/ Actionscript 3
• PHP w/ MySQL for UGC and CMS
• Deeplinking

• Backend Developer - Cameron Manderson
• Flash Developer - Neil Nand