Project:
Freemasonry is one of the oldest social and charitable organisations in the world. Organised freemasonry began in 1717, when freemasons from four London lodges met to form the world’s first Grand Lodge in the Goose and Gridiron tavern. During this time there was a boom in magazines, or periodicals, emerging from Britain’s busy city culture spurred on by the discussions in coffee houses and taverns. There were established titles aimed at both men and women specifically. So it was no surprise that several periodicals produced for freemasons appear toward the end of the century. Few complete series of these periodicals have survived in libraries and they have only limited indexes. Masonic Periodicals Online enables the most significant masonic periodicals from the period 1790 to 1900 to be searched.
Process:
I was the designer on this project at King's Digital Lab working with one developer and an analyst. Similar to the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition Facsimiles project, this project was done just after so it used a lot of the same interfaces and journeys. It also was an opportunity to improve and experiment with new ideas, layouts and interfaces.
A change of colours and fonts was implemented a few years after along with an accessibility assessment by another designer in the team.
