The ORG website – we need a designer!

We had one of those moments last week when we realised that, because almost everyone involved in ORG has bucketfuls of experience of designing and launching websites (indeed, I started working as a web designer/developer in ’98, and I can do this shit with my hands tied behind my back), the one thing that had escaped our attention was, in fact, the website. I’d been meaning to sit down and have a ‘proper think about it’ at some point, but got carried away with the new challenges of setting up an NGO instead and somehow ‘never quiet got round to it’. It’s funny how that works. You’d think that, given our collective expertise, we’d be all over the website like a rash, but instead it got put to one side as we grappled with the new, unfamiliar – and I’d say significantly harder – problems. Having realised that we really need to sort this website out, though, we have grabbed a hold of it by the jugular and are giving it a good shake. We’ve got a WordPress/PHP/Perl developer guru who’s happy to look after that side of things, but now we need a shithot designer to make everything look nice. We are looking for:

A dab hand with CSS to design the ORG blog (both static pages and blog posts in WordPress), wiki (MediaWiki unless you have a better idea) and supporters’ website. You will need to be able to work on this project immediately, alongside a project manager and our aforementioned developer on a pro bono basis.

If you would like to help out and have time to devote to this project, please send us an email with examples of your work. We also need a logo. I always consider logo design to be a somewhat specialised discipline. I used to be a reasonable web designer, but my logo design skills… well, let’s just say they suck, and leave it at that. If logo design is your bag, then we would love to hear from you. The brief for the logo is pretty simple, really:

The logo should have a long form, which includes the words ‘Open Rights Group’ and a short form, using the acronym ORG. It should be suitable for website, web kites, headed notepaper, business cards, t-shirts and stickers (including small ones). The logo should simple, distinctive and easily recognisable. Colours should be professional, with a slight hint of ‘in yer face’-ness – no pink or corporate blue. The font should be clean and unfussy.

Please do email us to talk about it further if you’d like to be involved with the logo design. If you’re really observant, you’ll have noticed incremental improvements in the blog already. We’re going to continue that, so please do bear with us whilst we sort everything else out and try to drag ourselves up out of beta.