This month we have re-launched our very own Chameleon Net website with a brand new look. When I came on board as Creative Director at the beginning of 2006 one of my first tasks was to undertake a re-working of the 'then' current branding. Far from throwing away everything that had come before and creating something completely new I wanted to capitalise on everything we had already achieved as a company, and the recognition we already had within the new media sector. I saw it more as an 'evolution of the brand' and in approaching the recent re-design of our website I really wanted to stay focused on the principle of evolving our online proposition rather than going back to the drawing board.

Our development team have spent a lot of time creating a flexible, scalable .NET and XML based solution that is robust and easily maintainable. Likewise we have invested many man hours, creating relevant copy to achieve a very search engine friendly, accessible site. So the design brief was quite simple; Bring the website in line with the current branding and communicate our design abilities without effecting any of the underlying code or foundation work already undertaken.

Interestingly enough this scenario is not uncommon among many of our clients. There are of course occasions when their current solution is too old to cost effectively salvage technology, but many of our projects have involved existing systems or required collaboration with an in-house IT team to effectively re-skin their offering. With contemporary standards based development techniques like CSS ( custom style sheets ) we can 'skin' just about any system.

So back to the new Chameleon Net offering. We have added a dynamic Content Managed Flash Banner to our homepage and in the long term we will be re-tasking this space with multiple promotional panels featuring video, animation and motion graphic work from the design team. We have further utilised flash, and specifically siFr, to convert structural headings ( H2, H3 etc.. ) into our brand font on the fly,  whilst retaining an accessible, standards compliant layout for users without the plugin.

I hope you like the new look Chameleon site as much as we do, and if you have any comments or ideas I would love to hear from you.

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In the autumn of 2004 I was sitting on a train with a friend of mine, Karen Jepp, and we were discussing climate change. We’d both been reading about it (Bill Bryson started the whole thing as I recall) and had both, unbeknownst to each other, been going through a whole range of emotions about the subject: interest, fascination, amazement, incredulity, anger, disgust and fear. We were both clear about one thing: it was not the latest fad, it was not hysteria. We (by which I mean ALL of us) were sleep walking into the biggest disaster the human race had ever faced – Climate Change.

You see even re-reading that sentence somewhere I cringe. Talk of disasters, sleep walking, even “the human race” somehow sounds over dramatic, an exaggeration. Yeah, yeah, another global threat, another disaster. It’ll be fine. It always has. Except this time it is highly likely that it just won’t be fine at all.