Victorian Premier's Design Awards
The Victorian Premier’s Design Awards are an opportunity to highlight and celebrate local design capability. Ladoo re-imagined the VPDA website as a showcase of design.
The Victorian Premier’s Design Awards are an opportunity to highlight and celebrate local design capability. Ladoo re-imagined the VPDA website as a showcase of design.
The Victorian Premier’s Design Awards are an opportunity to highlight and celebrate local design capability. The design sector is a significant contributor to the Victorian economy with over 98,000 people directly employed in design-related roles, and over $6 billion in annual revenue.
Through a thorough discovery process, including stakeholder workshops and interviews with members of the design community, Ladoo identified the need to place the winners and finalists of the awards at the forefront as a celebration of Victoria’s best design.
A comprehensive review of the initiative itself along with categories, past winners and finalists ensured the team had a clear view on the needs and possibilities for the showcases. The review also provided an understanding of the substantial content management task involved each year.
The website’s architecture was built around two primary functions: viewing the winners and finalists over the years, and providing information on how to enter the awards. The site also includes supporting information about the VPDA, introducing the awards jury, along with news articles and stories from past winners.
In addition to the showcase aspect of the project, the website needed to consider the different phases of the awards cycle from the ‘call for entries’, through to the judging phase and finally the winners being announced.
Ladoo used the new brand for the awards, which included a new logo and clean monotone palette, as the foundation for the website design. The black and white base is accented with the color and vibrancy of the design projects themselves, along with two shades which interaction primarily. This design approach ensures visual focus on the high quality design of the projects themselves.
The winners and finalists gallery on the site includes all winners since 2014, with over 320 project showcases organized by year and category. The VPDA website serves as a valuable living archive of Victoria’s best design across a wide range of categories and industries.
With around 100 finalists being loaded into the site each year, the site had to ensure the content management process was streamlined for the small team managing the site. As a highly visual initiative there were well over 500 images and video files loaded into the showcases alone.
To streamline the content management process for the small team managing the site, Ladoo created a new project showcase template within the Squiz Matrix CMS.
The structured template allows for the efficient and effective showcase of text, image, and video elements supplied by entrants. The gallery within each showcase also allows a range of images and videos of different shapes and sizes, saving time and accommodating the vast number of design projects.
Ladoo worked through all aspects of the project from discovery, design and development and continue to support the team during the annual upload process. The site is completely responsive and accessible as well allowing for great experience across all sorts of devices and circumstances.
