Happy Birthday Peace

Happy Birthday Peace celebrates the 50th anniversary of the Peace symbol which was drawn in 1958 by Gerald Holtom.

Happy Birthday Peace is designed to be both an interactive and education site and has features such as user contributed galleries for peace symbol art and videos, a message board and blog as well as educational and historical articles.

The site was designed and commissioned by Essential Works as a tie-in to the book "Peace - Fifty Years of Protest" by Barry Miles.

The main challenge was to provide a good range of easily managed content and moderated public contributions. This was to be controlled by a content management system.

An existing site had a front page and a basic gallery where visitors could download peace symbol templates and then submit their work based on them back to the site.

The design and resulting HTML/CSS was to be produced by Essential Works to then be incorporated into the content management system.

The information architecture and functionality were drawn up through a consultation process resulting in a thorough specification for the site. The design was then completed and HTML and CSS code passed to Sqoo for building the functionality.

Features include:

Article sections. Various sections for articles such as education, background etc.
Symbol gallery. Member submitted galleries. Users may download a template if they choose and then upload peace symbol artwork. Moderation is carried out via the content management system.
Message board. Members may post to a simple message board.
Blog. A blog section is used to update visitors on Happy Birthday Peace related events and articles.
Video gallery. A gallery for posting YouTube clips.
Newsletters.
Configurable right hand column. The content of the right hand column is configurable throughout the site. It is designed to alert visitors to content elsewhere on the site, information is automatically chosen and up to date.
Membership system. Visitors may sign up and get an account in order to interact.