I developed a website for HORATES, an Innovative Training Network funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

HORATES is short for Organic and Hybrid Thermoelectrics. At the heart of the project are 15 young PhD students who receive training from a consortium formed by 11 universities and other research institutions all over Europe.

The website introduces the network and the research conducted in the individual work packages of HORATES. It also informs about ongoing training activities and presents the project’s publications and other outcomes.

One central component is the HORATES blog run by the students. In the posts, the students present their individual research projects and write about their personal experience of being part of a large European research network. In this way, they learn to present scientific content in a compact and understandable way for a broad public.

My starting point was an existing site made with a free website builder. I built the site new from scratch in WordPress and moved it to a premium hosting service. I picked a theme, adapted it to the project’s corporate design, wrote texts and created illustrations. The latter includes vector-based maps showing the location of the involved partners for each subproject.

As thermoelectric materials convert heat, or more precisely, temperature gradients, into electricity, I worked with color gradients from red to purple as the central visual element. As an accent color, I chose a bold magenta.

Since HORATES is a publicly funded project of the European Union, data protection was a key criterion in the design. The website is fully compatible with the GDPR and does not make use of cookies or user tracking.

My work was finished off by writing a documentation and training the project participants through a webinar.