National Parks UK

National Parks UK - website design

Headscape worked with National Parks UK on a new design for its flagship site. The brief for the new design was to create a design that reflects their strap line ‘Britain’s Breathing Spaces’. 

We decided to kick the project off with a three-day workshop up at the National Parks offices in the Lake District. These immersive sessions gave us the chance to really get into detail regarding user journeys, content hierarchy, user requirements and how the National Parks brand should be interpreted online. Particularly, the longer sessions gave us the chance to try ideas out, refine them and even finalise some things prior to returning to Winchester to work on front-end development.

National Parks homepage
The new design utilises National Parks’ most stunning imagery. This is a departure from previous branding guidelines that made the inclusion of people mandatory in all images. We challenged this based on what the Parks’ social media community is sharing: gorgeous, scenic panoramas.

Headscape have exceeded our expectations for our new design, in all stages of the process. They did a lot of listening, they came up with ideas that we would never have thought of on our own, and questioned our assumptions to hone the site to really concentrate on our key messages to our key audiences.

Visually, they really took our desire for an image led brand, with clear, complementary typography, and have delivered a design which says more about who we are and what we do than we could ever try to convey with just text. But as a web manager, I have been really impressed with the way they have delivered our design. Not just a set number of templates, but modular code and content areas that can be mixed together like building blocks to create exactly the right layout for each individual page.

The code is so flexible that images, videos, galleries, block quotes, social media buttons and any other type of content can be placed in different areas of the column layout, and our feature boxes and lists can optionally contain images, links, bullets and captions. There is consistent styling, but we can fit the design to each individual piece of content, not have to re-work our content to fit with a rigid design – and that is why I would strongly recommend working with the team at Headscape.

Charlotte Westney, Digital Communications Manager, National Parks UK
National Parks pattern library
Screenshots taken from the National Parks pattern library showing grid-related rules and the presentation of maps.