All Consuming Frog Template Takes Over

You might remember the ‘I’ve seen the future’ post from way back in October last year. Since then things have moved on significantly with our ‘VLE’ project.
You can track the full development of the story via the ‘Frog Blog’ but suffice to say that recently the project has been virtually all consuming. Last month our ‘Frog Box’ finally arrived heralding the start of some pretty intensive design & consultation sessions. Senor Toad (a.k.a Paul Williamson) & I have been working very closely with two sets of ‘Frog Champions’, a student group & a staff one to clarify what we want our frog to be. The beauty of Frog is that it allows us to create a bespoke learning platform that looks & behaves however we determine & however best suits our users be they Students or Staff. Of course this is a fantastic opportunity but also an incredibly difficult one as it has to “everything to all people”. After lot’s of consultation I locked myself away in room with a head full of ideas, a notebook & a pencil & went through the ‘Staring at a blank piece of paper waiting for inspiration to arrive’ experience. I don’t mind admitting it but it took a while! However, I think (And the feedback so far seems to support the hypothesis) that we’ve got it pretty much spot on. Both camps had very strong opinions about what & how  they wanted our Frog to look & behave. Balancing those two approaches felt a little bit like juggling 1/2 dozen eggs while balancing on a beam mounted over a flaming pit surrounded by a moat of piranhas while someone took pot shots at me with a crossbow! In other-words ‘Tricky’.
However I have to say I’m pretty chuffed with the end result. It needs a few minor tweeks but as it stands it’s nearly there. The entire template was created in Photoshop and the finished multilayered document will be sent off to Frog headquarters in Halifax for senior designer ‘Andrew Beckwith’ to work some real magic on it. View a full scale version right here.
Find out more on the Frog Blog