*
Royal webdesign
A few months ago Julian Zimmermann, a very good friend of mine, told me about the most weird story I’ve heard for a long time. He has been searching for a project for his bachelor thesis in Communication Design and found a real King from Ghana – King Bansah – who lives in Ludwigshafen, Germany and works as a car mechanic in his own car repair shop. To collect money for his people in Ghana, to build bridges, schools and to support them wherever he can, he started a second career as Schlager-singer and travels throughout the country to do charity in TV-Shows and all kinds of fairs in his spare time.
Photography: © Mirka Laura Severa
Julian decided to create a new corporate design for the King to support him in his work and his communication and to help him stay serious, while working as a Schlager-singer. Julian designed pretty much anything a real King would ever need, starting with business cards, letter paper, royal certificates, autograph cards, an upcoming book about the King’s story and even a new bottle design for the official King Beer (Akosombo), which you actually can buy.
He then asked me if I could help him build King Bansah’s new website. Julian already had a great layout to start from and I was more than happy to help him with this amazing non-profit project. The design of the site is very clean and elegant with loads of white space, and though Julian is focused on print and corporate design, he found a great way to adapt the new design to the web.
While traveling to Ghana with the King to visit his home and his people, Julian got inspired by the basic African symbols and patterns. The new design is based on that together with the main colors gold and black.
The King has collected hundreds of pictures throughout the years and Julian and his girlfriend Mirka Laura Severa, who’s a very talented photographer, have been taking additional pictures while being in Ghana. So it was obvious that the website should focus on those amazing pictures and communicate the story and emotions through them.
Photography: © Mirka Laura Severa
In his layout Julian has placed a huge full screen picture behind the content and came up with the wish that the content could be minimized to see the picture behind it. This idea slowly grew from there and at the end we had this very special two-layer website, where you can switch between content in the foreground and a full screen picture gallery in the background with dozens of high-res pictures, which you can flick through.
All pictures are related to the content of the current page and locations in the caption are automatically linked to Google Maps to show the location where the picture has been taken.
The old website hasn’t been updated for years and it was clear that we had to avoid this for the new site by providing a very easy to use content management system. I decided to give Perch a try for the first time, which came out to be a very good decision. I never had a cms before which is so slim and flexible at the same time and the admin interface is super simple to handle.
Julian and King Bansah have been giving a talk at the Typo Berlin two weeks ago, which is Europe’s biggest annual design conference, and the response has been overwhelming so far. You should definitely check out the most detailed article about King Bansah and the whole design process on the Typoblog. Unfortunately it is written in German, but you can give the Google translated version a try.
The website has been a very special project to me and it was great to work together with Julian on this.
We’ve been talking a lot about the whole background of the project and our role as designers and Julian said one thing which really stuck in my head:
“You can’t really change the world as a designer, but you can help to make the work and life of people easier, who really do change the world.” (free translation :))
