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Foreign and Commonwealth Office - Planet Britain

March 1999

In late 1998 the Foreign and Commonwealth Office launched the “Britain in Asia” series of projects to promote Britain to the then tiger economies of the Far East. One of the projects was a promotional CD-ROM to be distributed at events and sent to journalists and decision-makers across the region. Fears that the CD-ROM would become rapidly dated led to the decision to create a website using the same content, but with updated news and features. It was, in effect, to be a blog.

I translated the design of the CD-ROM to a web format, and designed these backgrounds - based on the Union Flag - for each of the ‘blog category’ pages. To keep within the style and requirements of the client, these pages scrolled horizontally. While I designed the backgrounds to be in-keeping with the main art direction of the project, I wanted to introduce something fresh - free from the heavy effects of CD-ROM design at the time - and focussed on the graphic qualities of the flag. Each section had its own background, some of which I pixel-painted to ensure maximum clarity and to keep the file sizes to a minimum.