Mark Boulton Design

Citizens Theatre is an iconic venue and theatre company based in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland. Citz, as the theatre is affectionately known, worked with us to overhaul their web presence, winning an industry Audience's award in the process.

First opened as a theatre in 1878, the Citizens company was founded in 1943 and the Citizens Theatre was permanently established in 1945. Since then it has been one of Scotland’s flagship producing theatres.

The theatre needed a website that pulled together a distributed content model. Content was created on several social platforms - from My Space to Flickr - and pulled from those sites into a single 'activity stream' on the homepage. This approach still retains the reach of the individual platforms, but allows presentational control for the theatre website.

The Citizens Theatre produces a wide variety of output - from pantomimes to children's acting workshops. Each of these productions caters for a specific audience and the design of the site had to reflect that diversity. Each production has a unique page design that the theatre team can change easily and effectively with a simple CSS change and a new image. This simple yet effective technique for individual page layout has allowed the theatre to produce stunning, targeted design for individual audience groups.

The site has won a number of awards. Most notably an 'Audiences' award from the Scottish Arts Council for exceptional use of audience data and statistics in delivering a web site. This was gained after developing personas with Mark Boulton Design during the initial design process.

Responsibilities: Audience research, User Experience Design, Information Architecture, Art Direction, Graphic Design, HTML/CSS development, Expression Engine development.