National Partnership for Ocean Prediction: the UK's marine science partnership, given a platform to match.
Brand workshop, identity guide and full website build for a research consortium led by the Met Office. Six partner institutions, 20+ contributors, one WordPress platform that any of them can publish to without raising a ticket.
A research consortium with a branding problem
and a publishing bottleneck.
The National Partnership for Ocean Prediction (NPOP) brings together the UK's most important marine and oceanographic research centres — the Met Office, the National Oceanography Centre (NOC), Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML), and the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (Cefas) — to coordinate ocean prediction research and services. Marine Scotland and the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO) are also joining the partnership.
The existing oceanprediction.org website was static and outdated. Researchers across six institutions couldn't publish or update content without going through a single point of contact. The brand identity had evolved organically and no longer reflected the partnership's national significance or the calibre of its member organisations.
NPOP needed two things: a lightweight branding exercise to establish a coherent identity across the partnership, and a modern publishing platform that 20+ contributors from different institutions could use independently — without developers in the loop and without breaking each other's work. The platform also had to handle large-file storage for research documents (some exceeding 500MB), event management with registration, and a document repository with differentiated access levels. It needed to be built to last across research funding cycles, not designed around a single project phase.
Brand first,
then build to brief.
Most consortium websites skip straight to the build and end up with a platform that looks like it was designed by committee — because it was. We started with a half-day brand workshop to get the partnership's identity right before touching a wireframe. That's a lightweight engagement, but it changed the project.
Ran a structured brand workshop with the NPOP team to define positioning, audience, tone of voice and visual direction. We presented five distinct style directions — from traditional institutional to tech-forward — and worked through them collaboratively to land on a "Modern Scientific" positioning: authoritative but contemporary, data-forward without being cold. The workshop output fed directly into a brand identity guide covering logo usage, colour palette, typography system (Space Grotesk and Inter), tone of voice principles and application examples. A small piece of work, but it gave six institutions a single reference point for the first time.
Designed the content architecture around NPOP's real-world publishing pattern: Activity Groups, partner organisations, events, workshops and a deep document library. Built a hierarchical permissions model — Executive Committee members with full admin access, Organisation Leads editing their own content, Contributors submitting for review — so researchers from any partner institution can publish without stepping on each other's work. Amazon S3 integration handles the large-file storage requirement, keeping 500MB+ research documents and datasets off the WordPress media library entirely.
Built on Elementor Pro with Astra theme — the same proven stack we use across our public sector portfolio, chosen for editorial capability rather than developer convenience. Structured templates lock layout while letting non-technical contributors publish news, event listings, workshop reports and Activity Group updates. Document repository with differentiated access. Event management with integrated registration forms. JSON-LD structured data, GA4 with custom event tracking, and Velocity Bolt hosting on Cloudways LiteSpeed with Cloudflare CDN and WAF.
Brand, platform, publishing workflow
— all from one engagement.
The project delivered a brand identity and a publishing platform in a single engagement. The brand guide gave six institutions a shared visual language for the first time. The website gave 20+ researchers a way to publish without gatekeepers. Both were designed to outlast the current funding cycle.
Half-day brand workshop, five style directions explored, one chosen. Delivered as a documented brand guide covering logo, colour palette, typography, tone of voice and application examples. Lightweight but foundational — the first time the partnership had a single brand reference.
Hierarchical permissions across six institutions. Executive Committee, Organisation Leads and Contributors each see only what they need. Structured Elementor templates prevent layout breakage. No developer tickets required to publish.
Amazon S3 integration for large-file storage — research documents and datasets up to 500MB+ kept entirely off the WordPress media library. Differentiated access levels control who can view, download and upload.
Built-in event management with online registration forms. Workshop reports, Activity Group meetings and partnership conferences all managed through the CMS by the team, not by us.
Cloudways LiteSpeed infrastructure with Cloudflare CDN and WAF. Professional tier — the same managed hosting stack used across our public sector and research portfolio.
JSON-LD markup for traditional search and AI-generated answers. GA4 with custom event tracking for document downloads, registration completions, and content engagement across Activity Groups.
The results that matter.
From brand guide to live pages
— the work that shipped.
The project spans brand identity, website design and a publishing platform built for researchers. Screenshots show the brand guide deliverable alongside the live site — Activity Group pages, event listings, document repository, and the homepage.
Martin and the team provided a really quick and high quality build of our National Partnership for Ocean Prediction website, including an update to branding and really useful training on the content management system.
More public sector and research work.
Research consortium needing a platform?
Tell us about the partnership and the publishing problem. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right fit — and if we are, what a brand workshop and build would look like.