OSISA - Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa

visit the osisa website

OSISA is the Southern Africa arm of the Open Society Institute, George Soros' philanthropic endeavour. OSISA run projects in many countries in Southern Africa, reporting, publishing and supporting civil society.

Working 3rd hand

This website came to us from Library Design in Johannesburg. They have done really great graphic design work for OSISA in the past, and we worked from that to create the bold, assymetrical layout for the website. They also managed the project very well, which made the end result great. We have developed a very useful process for creating websites that do more than just look good, and we're happy to help design studios and advertising agencies to follow it when we're helping them with online media for their client.

Consistency is key

This is a deceptively simple site. It reuses formats and layouts - especially within major sections - which allows users to browse it easily. OSISA has a large library of images which we've used in a simple slideshow at the head of each page.

Consistency of layout also means that the site can grow easily - adding sub-pages and content is straightforward and doesn't require redesigning.

off-the-shelf CMS?

The previous OSISA site was created on an off-the-shelf CMS and it showed. Out-the-box CMS's are great, but they're require just as much knowledge and effort to create a great website from as a customer-built CMS. The new OSISA site allows easy content editing and page creation, which, when mixed with our expertise, resulted in a simple, clear site with good information delivery.