Xeno Portal

Our second commission for South East Grid for Learning, and our biggest challenge to date. Xeno were eager to launch a new ‘Moodle’ web portal to serve as a first point of on-line learning for children and the educationalists involved in supporting their learning. The brief was to develop a Moodle ‘theme’ for each of three ‘user groups’ – primary children, secondary pupils and adult.

The process began with the development of ‘mood boards’ allowing the Xeno team to input into the design at an early stage. Feedback resulted in the development of the Xeno portal logo, bold and fresh, geometric patterned backgrounds and an intuitive navigation system. These key design elements were applied in appropriate styles across all three user group interfaces.

The primary design centers around a play-park setting with Xeno ‘beings’ involved in various physical activities and generally having ‘fun!’ The secondary design was injected with shots of red, yellow and cyan and the integration of hand drawn ‘scribble’ and ‘jotter’ elements. The final ‘adult’ design evolved as a more reserved version of the secondary design, with a purple and lilac colour palette and soft flowing lines.

Icon sets were created for each of the user groups, styled as 3D buttons with bold, recognizable symbols. The primary icon set incorporates the Xeno ‘beings’, adding interest for younger children.

Due to the layout restrictions of the Moodle platform, we extended the core functionality to enable us to develop more engaging and interactive themes to bring the portal to life!

Please note that you may require a Xeno account to access much of the site content including resource icons.