UKA - The Rebirth

Written by Ross Locksley on 01 Apr 2009

This tale starts about a year ago with a trip to Brighton to have lunch with my girlfriend and two of her close friends, a journalist named Rob Fahey (a writer for Eurogamer, The Times and others) and his partner. To while away time on the journey from London, Rob and I are discussing anime websites and the state of the industry. Rob is nothing if not candid, and during the conversation he said that there was no single definitive website for anime in the UK. Having run UKA for about 12 years, that gave me something to think about!

The obvious response would be to offer up UKA as an example of a well written site with plenty of content, but I could see that the argument didn't have quite enough firepower - fair enough, UKA was established and (mostly) well written, but compared to a site like IGN, it looked weak.

So off I went and thought quite long and hard about what needed to be done.

The idea for redesigning and relaunching UKA was a result of several things happening in tandem - firstly, I had a client that required their websites be written exclusively in CSS, something I'd never done before. Secondly, UKA was starting to show a lot more promise - the newer writers were settling in, news was a little more frequent, and there was more of a buzz than had been usual just a few months before. Finally, the failure of one of my struggling clients, despite my best efforts to save them, had given me more time to myself. There had been glaring failings on the part of this particular client - lack of a coherent identity, poor content management, lack of vision and an inability to adapt through sheer bloody-mindedness, all of which had made me thoroughly frustrated, and UKA was the perfect place to vent.

The convenient mix of time on my hands, the need for a testbed for new code (a role UKA has always played in my business) and a seeming eagerness from the community for change led me to bite the bullet and vent my frustrated creativity on a project of my own. UKA was due for a change.

It also needed an identity.

During the UKA redesign, which was influenced by sites such as IGN in terms of how we display our content, I also wanted a background image that was striking. For the past 14 years we've used several characters to illustrate our site, and luckily the copyright owners never took offense. It was always a fine line though, and if UKA was to become a commercial entity, it had to break the habit of a lifetime and stop borrowing from other companies.

During the redesign process, I had selected a character I had assumed was Hatsune Miku (but later realised was a fan-created homage) for our new background character, and this drastically altered our colour scheme. I loved the blues and greens that had been used in Miku's character design, and wanted something similar for myself. When I realised that my chosen background was in fact fan-art, I accelerated the process of finding an artist and primed UKA's coffers to take a hit. Now all I had to do was find the artist.

Unbelievably it took me about a month to find the right guy, and even though I'd trawled DeviantArt for potentials, I actually found my guy when I bumped into his rendition of Hatsune Miku of all characters. Luckily he answered my email and work started quickly.