We’re currently seeking a design guru to give the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s core web presence a makeover. This is a volunteer position, which will involve working closely with the Foundation to integrate and improve its two most high ranking sites:

If you are interested in the position, please get in touch on info at okfn dot org!

Cropped version of 2.26.09: color wheel by Team Dalog on Flickr

What are we looking for?

We are looking for a design guru with a strong visual sense to help us reinvent the Open Knowledge Foundation‘s online presence. While our blog and main website have served us well until now – we think they are beginning to look a bit tired and are keen to create something which is easier on the eye, more intuitive to navigate and better reflects our work.

Our virtual real estate receives hundreds of thousands of visitors every month. While this is a volunteer position, we will credit the designer on every page of our site which should be excellent publicity!

Misc 37 by fontplaydotcom on Flickr

Design brief

The Open Knowledge Foundation is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2004. It is dedicated to promoting all forms of open content and open data, “from sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata”.

We’re a community-driven organisation, with a large network and a diverse portfolio of projects. We’d like the new site to better reflect our activities and to communicate what we do to a general audience not familiar with our work.

Some of the things we’re looking for in a new design:

  • Visually integrating our blog and our main website. Currently our blog runs on WordPress, and our main site runs on a Moin Moin wiki. We plan to move the main site content and our blog content to a single WordPress site – so we’d like a design for a WordPress theme that will help to integrate the two.
  • Something that better reflects our work. We have a large number of projects and working groups and we’d like the new design to do a better job at foregrounding these. This diagram gives an overview of many of our projects, groups and events. We want to make it easier for people to find these, and to get involved.
  • Simple, clean, uncluttered, colourful. We’d like a new design to convey our work as simply as possible. For our part we’re planning on streamlining our prose, and improving the way we communicate our mission and why it matters. We’d like a new design that will foreground what is most important to the Foundation.
  • Better integration of feeds. We have plenty of feeds that we could use more effectively. From mailing list posts and project feeds to microblog posts and subject tags – we should present more of what we up to on our website.

What do you think? What else could we improve? If you have any more ideas, please let us know in a comment below.

Stained Glass Bay Window Sundial by John Carmichael on Flickr

Get in touch!

If you are interested in the position, please get in touch on info at okfn dot org, and let us know:

  • Your name, affiliation, and website
  • Some examples of previous design work that you have done
  • Your ideas about the redesign: what you would improve and how

If you know anyone who you think might be interested to hear about the position – please point them to this post! You can also help spread the word by microblogging the following:

  • **Looking for a design guru to give the Open Knowledge Foundation @okfn a makeover! Please RT: **
Website | + posts

Dr. Jonathan Gray is Lecturer in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, where he is currently writing a book on data worlds. He is also Cofounder of the Public Data Lab; and Research Associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris). More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org and he tweets at @jwyg.

1 thought on “Looking for a design guru to give the Open Knowledge Foundation a makeover!”

Comments are closed.