Laura Hirt

Design portfolio Photography Info

What's for dinner?

The context

BBC Food has a fantastic recipe database. How can it be optimized for mobiles, without doing just another cooking app with tedious lists of recipes?

The solution

This app proposal concentrate on encouraging the discovery of new food and giving cooking inspiration by bringing randomly recipes suggestions from the BBC database . Users can specify their taste/dietary needs with filters, as well as add ingredients to their "shopping list" or also add recipes to their "favourites".

My role

Concept development, user interface design
(self-initiated project)

CBBC Skins

The context

CBBC is the BBC channel aimed at children aged 6 to 12 years old. The channel's website provides content such as games and video clips from many different beloved brands (Shaun the Sheep, Blue Peter, Tracy Beaker, etc).

The project

The aim of this project was to create an enhanced brand experience by designing customized skins for some of the most popular shows. This allows to bring out the brand's identity and flavour, while retaining a consistent user experience throughout the website.

My role

Illustration, user interface design

BBC Indonesia

The context

The BBC World Service, which offers news content in 27 different languages, has been going through a redesign of its portfolio of websites in order to adapt to the new BBC style guideline.

The project

The relaunch of BBC Indonesia, one of the biggest language service from the BBC, was in due course. I served as primary designer, within a team of 4 (journalist, developer, producer) to restructure the website, redesign the layout and create training documents for the team of journalists.

My role

Information architecture, layout design, quality assurance.

Latest News module

The context

Another project I carried on during my time at the BBC World Service. The BBC Mundo service (news for Latin America) requested a "latest-news" module for their homepage that was to bring liveliness to the website.

The solution

Designed to fit the BBC style guideline, this module displays the latest news in real time. It ended up being used by several other language services, including BBC Russian, BBC Chinese, BBC Hindi and BBC Arabic.

My role

Interaction design, visual design, quality assurance.

Book Covers

The context

For this university project, I was asked to design covers for several assigned books of different genres (crime, humour, science-fiction, etc).

The solution

Instead of doing one-off designs, I prefered designing the covers as a set from a publishing company. Using see-through typography, I played with abstracting imagery to convey the essence and style of the book.

My role

Illustration, layout design.

Cbeebies Radio

The context

Cbeebies is the BBC channel aimed at children 6 years and under. The channel's website features the Cbeebies Radio, providing audio content such as stories, "music and movement" activities and podcasts.

The project

My role on this project was to redesign and simplify the interface of this Flash microsite. One of the improvements over the old interface was the added functionnality of choosing an age group ("small listeners" for children under 3 and "bigger listeners" for 3 to 6-year-olds).

My role

Illustration, user interface design, quality assurance.

Fruit not sugar!

The context

Feel Good Drinks is a British soft drinks company. For this university project, the brief required to advertise the fact.

The solution

While any medium was possible for this project, I designed a smartphone game to convey the playfulness of the brand. The game is inspired by classics such as Tetris: the user has to fill up the bottle by catching fruits falling from the sky and firing rockets at evil sugar cubes. You can try the game prototype (for large screens)

My role

Concept development, visual design, prototyping.

Zwind

The context

Zwind is a medium-sized Dutch company working with associations and governmental administrations for the realisation of social projects (community regeneration, creation of youth associations, etc). I worked in collaboration with Matthijs Van Leeuwen to design the new visual identity of Zwind.

The solution

The identity is based on a skewed collage of photos from different Zwind projects, thus conveying the dynamism and proactivity of the company for the completion of social projects.

My role

Concept generation, visual design

CBBC Things To Do

The context

I'm showing here a few different projects I did for CBBC online (BBC brand aimed at children aged 6 to 12).

The project

I designed several downloadable paper games, which are all available for free from the Things To Do section of the CBBC website. The games are based on popular TV shows (Tracy Beaker, Sarah Jane, etc). They require a simple assembly and then lots of fun! I also designed one-off pages for specials events, like the "Summer Vote" where kids could vote for their favourite character from 5 different top TV shows.

My role

Illustration, copy-writing (game instructions), interaction and visual design.

BBC News FB app

The context

BBC News had a fragmented presence on Facebook, with different pages for different news type (e.g. Business news) and News TV shows (e.g. BBC Breakfast). This project was about regrouping all these into one central Facebook app.

The solution

This app works as a control panel where users can like specific sections of the BBC News website (Politics, Health, etc) or follow programmes and correspondents. Any category that is 'liked' will filter related content into the user's news feed. Launch the app!

My role

(In collaboration with Stuart Bayston) Interaction and visual design

About

Ha well, this the bit where I finally get to talk about myself! For those with a good sense of observation, you might have guessed that my name's Laura Hirt. I am a French and Swiss graphic designer specializing in digital media. I work across both interaction and visual design on a variety of projects, from game design to corporate websites. I also like to do a bit of front-end web development and I am a keen amateur photographer, inspired mostly by travels and nature.

I hold a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic & Media Design from the London College of Communication and have two years of experience, working both in corporate and agency environments.

Contact

Shoot me an email at: laura.hirt4@gmail.com

I'm also on Linkedin