Ecologic Radio

As webmaster for Ecologic Radio, I designed and developed their web presence from scratch, creating dynamically populated pages that make use of Wordpress' content management system. As Creative Director, I worked with an international team of journalists and guests to develop episodes and design visual media that accompanied and expanded upon each episode's content.
NEW MEDIA, RESPONSIVE DESIGN, VISUAL MOCKUP, CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Ecologic Radio

THE CHALLENGE

Web Presence, Audio Production for Podcast

MY ROLE

Creative Director, UX Designer, Web Developer

THE SOLUTION

Project Management, Responsive Design, Wordpress Theme Development, PHP, jQuery

Stakeholder Interviews

Ecologic is a radio show and podcast dedicated to bringing science journalism to an international audience. Stakeholders received a grant from the European Society for Evolutionary Biology to develop a radio program that addresses issues at the intersection of ecology and culture. Ecologic required a web portal that allowed users to listen to episodes and engage with educational materials that illustrated and advanced the message of each episode.

Wireframes

The editorial nature of Ecologic called for a format that represented episodes both pictorially and textually. With content that is episodic in nature, I also needed to design for a content management system to populated the assets of each episode in a cyclical format, with most recent episodes appearing at the top of the homepage and pushing past episodes further down the page.

High Fidelity Mockup

Episodes included main titles and subtitles, requiring I create affordances for both as image overlays for each episode. Using headers with transparent backgrounds allowed for a glossy, magazine-like visual design, creating an experience that encouraged users to browse among topics before listening. Newest episodes would be available for listening right from the homepage, and all episodes would have their own page that housed audio playback and editorial content.

Development & Content Deployment

Using a combination of HTML, CSS, jQuery and PHP with the Wordpress content management system, I developed a fully-functioning web presence for Ecologic Radio. Episodes filtered from the top of the page down according to date published, with new episodes appearing automatically in the featured hero image section. Responsively designed, all content collapsed into a single column on mobile devices, allowing the page to be viewed at any screen resolution on any device.

Data Visualization

On the dedicated pages for each episode, I worked with the journalists authoring the story to design data visualizations that further illustrated the concepts of the episode. Sometimes journalists would have an idea for what they wanted the data visualization to include, other times they would send me a stack of research data and see what I would come up with. In this way, I worked with journalists and academics reporting from the U.S., Austria, Uganda, Honduras and Brazil to meet the demands of the show.

Visit Ecologic's Soundcloud page to listen to past episodes.