Maker of Middle-Earth

Crafting an online presence for the Bodleian Library’s most amazing exhibition.

The Challenge

When the Bodleian Library gets in touch and says “how would you like to make a website for our largest ever exhibition” you sit up and take notice. When they go on to tell you that its an exhibition of Tolkien’s original illustrations, writings and notebooks, and at least one of your team is a card-carrying Tolkien geek then it becomes a dream project.

We were given a beautiful existing brand and some of the most wonderful graphic ingredients we’ve ever been lucky enough to work with. Using these, we began work to design and build a site and animation to support the exhibition.

Elen sila lumenn’ omentielvo.

Project facts

Type

Event website

Sector

Education

Services

Site architecture and design

Site development

Animation design and production

Launch date

February 2018

What we did

Clearly, anyone who works on an exhibition like this is lucky. It’s a gem of a project, and we worked hard to produce a gem of a website and a sparkly animation. The’re both elegant, beautiful and usable, full of subtle interactions and movements.

What the client said

“They were a pleasure to work with. We needed a site that would help us highlight the visual beauty of our exhibition as well as drive ticket bookings, and Herd came up with not only a stunning design but a really intuitive and easy-to-use website – not only that but they didn’t bat an eye at some of the timing and content restrictions we imposed.”

Liz McCarthy

Bodleian Library