Phew! Just finished this information pack for CENEX – the UK’s national centre of excellence for low carbon and fuel cell technologies. It was a race against the clock to ensure that printed copies were available on time for conference delegates. It was close, but we made it.

After the event Chris Walsh, Head of Technical Support and Consultancy, commented:

‘Wingfinger did some great work producing our Fleet carbon reduction information packs, helping us pull the whole job together against a very tight deadline.’

If you’d like us to bring together your information in a clear and concise way, give us a call on 0113 2450469.

We’ve just completed work on this website for the Venkatraman Memorial Trust – a small charity supporting the education of children in the fishing village of Kovalam near Chennai in the south of India. It looks like we did OK, if client Lindsay Swan’s comments are anything to go by:

‘We are delighted with our new website. We wanted a design that captured the vibrant colours and spirit of Kovalam and provided an attractive background for our growing photo library. The new site does this beautifully and it is also completely painless to maintain.
Thank you Wingfinger for a fantastic job.’

This site is a good example of our basic content-managed website with prices starting from just £518 +VAT. If you’d like us to put one together for you, give us a call on 0113 2450469.

We continue to do a lot of design for charity and non-profit organisations, and a new addition to our portfolio of reports and policy papers is the Jubilee Debt Campaign’s annual review. See more samples of reports in the reports section of our portfolio. Another recent addition to the site is a new case study on our approach to designing for languages. We’ve looked at some of the issues relating to this sort of design project, and the approaches we have developed at Wingfinger to turn a text-heavy or jargon-filled paper into a sharp, readable piece of literature.

An innovative national campaign has been launched today calling for a tiny tax on banking transactions that would raise billions to tackle poverty and climate change. The Robin Hood Tax would only be a 0.05% levy on speculative financial transactions, amounting to 50p in every £1000 – this is almost unnoticeable in the context of the amounts that these guys are trading (currently untaxed) on a daily basis, and would all happen at the trading level (in other words, before it gets anywhere near little people like us).

Gordon Brown and the French and German leaders have all raised this in recent weeks and it’s great to see the idea gaining momentum in wider public discussion. You can support the campaign by signing up at www.robinhoodtax.org.uk, where there are also clear and simple explanations of how it all actually works.

Our friends at Stamp Out Poverty are very much involved with the Robin Hood Tax campaign, and have been working for years to publicise this as a means of finding more money for relieving poverty across the world. They’ve already got lots of reasonable answers to critics of currency transaction tax, as well as evidence and case studies to show just how well this would work and the good it could do. All the info is in their resources section at www.stampoutpoverty.org.

January has seen the relaunch of the Carplus website. Wingfinger came on board to help carplus restructure content and to bring the site across to a WordPress-powered CMS. We’ve found WordPress to be a versatile and accessible content management tool, and are once again pleased with the results!

The site was redeveloped to complement (and in the future, incorporate) an existing site, Carclubs UK, designed by Provokateur design agency. Although the new Carplus site was far more content-driven, and needed several levels of navigation, we used Provokateur’s lovely, crisp imagery to preserve the nice light feel of its sister site.

We wanted a design that would stand up to regular content change and additions, and created a WordPress theme that would give our client maximum flexibility for content input, without the worries of corrupting the actual page layout (a classic CMS issue!). Along with creating standard pages of text and image content, the client is able to create forms and databases for event bookings, and create, mail out and display XML newsletters.

We’ve enjoyed a great working relationship with Carplus throughout the redevelopment, and have put together an on-going support package to ensure that the site continues to blossom, and remains adaptable for their needs.

Carplus is a national charity promoting responsible car use. Their website contains a wide range of information and resources on sustainable transport information, setting up car share clubs, and the environmental, financial and social impact of car dependency. Find news and updates on the organisation at https://twitter.com/carplustrust.