Birmingham Science Park-based digital agency Class Creative has secured a high profile contract to design the brand and website for ‘eMonocot’.
Class Creative – Chris Pyatt and Jonathan Tiernan
eMonocot is a collaborative project by the Natural History Museum, University of Oxford, and lead organisation Royal Botanic Gardens Kew.
The collaboration has secured a three year, multi-million pound grant from the Natural Environment Research Council to develop a novel, biodiversity web-resource for monocot plants: Monocots constitute approximately 20 per cent (70,000 species) of all higher plants and include numerous groups of the highest conservation, ecological and economic importance, such as grasses, sedges, orchids, palms and aroids.
Class Creative secured the design contract by the use of original contemporary illustrations and user friendly features designed to ensure the eMonocot website has mass appeal.
Chris Pyatt, Co-Founder of Class Creative said: “We have only been established for two years, so to have a won a design contract from the University of Oxford, Kew and the Natural History Museum just shows that barriers are there to be broken. We won the eMonocot work due to our original illustrations, user-friendly design ideas, and the fact the project leads took comfort that they would be working with Class Creative’s business owners. So many small businesses believe the procurement procedures of large, high profile companies will work against them, but if you can demonstrate originality, value for money and passion, you can succeed.
“Class Creative was a two-man start-up, but we are now on the way to being a team of five, which has happened in a very short amount of time. We moved to Faraday Wharf at Birmingham Science Park last year and our business took off within weeks of settling in. We wouldn’t have grown at such a fast pace if we were based in the Jewellery Quarter or Digbeth. The community at the Science Park is fantastic; there’s an open-door policy between all the start-ups. Everyone believes in collaboration, rather than competition, and our collective network of contacts is amazing.”
Class Creative has been named as one of industry-publication The Drum’s ‘2012 top emerging companies in the UK’ and Chris Pyatt was recognised in Insider Midlands magazine’s 42 under 42 class of 2012. The agency’s key clients include Packt Publishing, Birmingham Hippodrome, St David’s Hotel in Cardiff, TedX and Birmingham Forward.
As the lead organisation for the eMonocot project, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew has been given the job of generating the content for the ambitious, information-rich website, which will go live in 2013. As well as using existing data and revealing new findings, the global community will be encouraged to contribute data to the online educational resource. Though focused on a specific plant group, eMonocot is among the most ambitious eTaxonomy projects yet attempted and has the potential to revolutionise the way taxonomic data are organised and accessed, by both the practitioners and users of taxonomy.