In the first months of 2004, CogApp won a four-way pitch (against Getfrank amongst others!) for the highly prestigious, £1 million Icons project.
CogApp's key idea was to create a sustainable enterprise - the Icons Online company - which would be incubated by CogApp to become a fully self-sufficient entity in its own right.
After protracted contract negotiations, work on Icons began in earnest in February 2005.
The Icons programme was a huge endeavour, with 19 separate work packages, a budget in excess of £1 million, a two (2) year lifecycle - and huge creative and cultural ambitions. Coordinating a programme of effort like this, taking in brand, web, recruitment, marketing, infrastructure, project management and creative production, took up a huge amount of my time and headspace after I arrived at CogApp.
I began my work with an intense planning phase, and the production of a swathe of documentation, followed by a brand development exercise. Information architecture for the first of two Icons websites - the v0 or "holding site" - followed next, along with usability planning, recruitment, infrastructure planning and marketing planning.
The v0 Icons website launched in August 2005, followed by the main v1 site in late November 2005. |
