Project Overview
Gippslandia is a community, non-profit print publication promoting the Gippsland region in Victoria. They highlight local makers and creatives, curating an ever-optimistic take on regional, national and global issues.
This website redevelopment project aimed to engage the current audience, while also fostering a more vibrant, inclusive, and active Gippsland community.
The visual design of Gippslandia takes cues from the print publication and elevates them for the digital context. Bold typography paired with a grid-bending layout creates an engaging experience across all devices and screen sizes—bringing the eccentricity, artfulness and liveliness of the Gippsland region to life online.
Gippslandia.com.au is about the content: imagery, articles and people. While the overall impression of the design is bold and brutalist, we took care to design by focussing first on the experience of reading an article, and creating a system of layout and design that supports that fundamental part of Gippslandia.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Penny McVey, Delivery Lead
Jacob Zinman-Jeanes, Design Director
Aziza Mohammed, Content Strategist
Jonathan Puc, Developer
Jolane Synott, Technical Lead
Project Brief
Our approach was to work collaboratively with the Gippslandia editorial team—who were well-versed in print publishing, content development, and design—to define a vision for the new website.
The visual design of Gippslandia takes cues from the print publication and elevates them for the digital context. Bold typography paired with a grid-bending layout creates an engaging experience across all devices and screen sizes. Bringing the eccentricity, artfulness and liveliness of the Gippsland region to life online.
Gippslandia.com.au is about the content: imagery, articles and people. While the overall impression of the design is bold and brutalist, we took care to design by focussing first on the experience of reading an article, and creating a system of layout and design that supports that fundamental part of Gippslandia.
Gippslandia.com.au is successful in capturing and elevating the visual identity of the printed publication in a bold output that doesn’t sacrifice usability or readability. It provides a user-friendly and accessible platform to highlight local contributors and makers, succeeding on the vision to invigorate the Gippsland community.
Alongside the technical requirements and a new look and feel, we prioritised flexibility in site components and efficient web management processes so the team at Gippslandia were able to take the reins of the new website with confidence and ease.
Project Need
With a digital-first design, discovery-based information architecture, and a new technical stack—Gippslandia have an elevated digital presence that does justice to their beautiful curated content.
A multi-vendor marketplace—complete with custom styling—provides an exemplary user experience and gateway to the products of local makers, growers and creatives.
The result of this project has brought forward greater membership functionality as a way to give back to the generous contributors of the paper—encouraging the thriving local community.
The new Gippslandia website is built with a static site generator, meaning all resources and content are pre-fetched and injected into their assigned page templates which results in a site that is blazing fast and fully optimised.
Furthermore, the CMS of and the front-end website of are decoupled or in other words, independent of each other. This setup allows for easier maintenance and scalability of the site as it eliminates issues you may find with more traditional CMS’s where if the CMS is down, the front-end website is down too.
User Experience
The previous experience featured compelling, curated content that was buried within an expansive information architecture and page layouts that didn’t support exploration.
We completed an audit on the existing site to define different ways into content. Identifying a refined set of topics, content types, and regions enabled us to anchor content to consistent themes, while allowing users to discover the diverse stories created by Gippslandia’s community of writers, makers and creatives.
We took a content-first approach to designing flexible templates that used consistent navigation patterns as a way of connecting users to other content across the site.
Project Marketing
Originating as a print publication, Gippslandia highlights local makers and creatives, curating an ever-optimistic take on regional, national and global issues.
With a digital-first design, discovery-based information architecture, and a new technical stack—Gippslandia now have an elevated digital presence that does justice to their beautiful curated content.
After the devastating bushfires and a global pandemic, this website project was perfectly timed to help breathe vitality back into one of the most beautiful parts of Victoria.
Digital - News & information
We all rely on digital services that broadcast or diffuse news and current affairs both locally and globally, keep us up to date with important information such as weather, warnings and hazards and allow us to quickly access information and reference resources.
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