St Jerome's Laneway FestivalAn Extra Medium project in collaboration with Bolsterlanewayfestival.com
Across a decade of expansion, St Jerome's Laneway Festival has become an international signifier of essential music, often booking acts just before they break globally.
ChallengeLaneway Festival presented a website that was hard to use and difficult to navigate. The team were wanting to streamline the customer experience as much as possible, while also reducing the amount of information hosted on the website.
With 6 festival dates (Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne, Perth), each city has relevant information that sat on a separate minisite, which meant the Laneway team was doubling up on a lot of content updates by having to enter in the same info on each minisite.
The core challenge was to ensure the festival’s artwork was incorporated into the site to showcase Jack Irvine’s work and to keep all touch points connected and holistic from socials to the website to the event.
A huge emphasis was expressed into wanting the new site to be functional, user friendly and ensure we were complying with Accessibility standards.ApproachLaneway's website posed a multifaceted challenge: it was information-heavy and stood on it’s own not connected to the event and socials look and feel. We wanted to streamline this labyrinth of information while highlighting Jack Irvine's festival artwork.
We aimed to harmonise all touchpoints, ensuring a seamless experience from social media to the website to the event itself. With a focus on user-friendliness and accessibility standards, we tackled the core challenge: consolidating content updates, reducing redundancy, and creating a functional, cohesive website.
Design SystemWe established a design system that was evergreen - we wanted it to be able to live beyond the year's festival season. We started with a solid sans serif font for all body copy that we knew would be accessible while also fitting the creative direction. We then crafted a colour system that made the illustrations and animations sing and dance, while serving as a palette to compliment the extensive content library. Each event city was attributed a primary colour palette that related back ot the artwork and made each city’s pages feel unique and easy to navigate. Experience DesignWith Laneway appealing to such a vast audience, we knew that the experience would need to be adaptable. We explored new features that provided a rich, utility-driven experience with no dead-ends for customers. This meant replacing the pre-existing IA with one that resulted in finding punters answers for their specific event, quickly and easily. We made it easy for customers to switch between microsites to access city-specific information by using a colour system and a stick navigation button selector. This allowed for improved confidence in UX and navigating the site.St Jerome’s Laneway Festivallanewayfestival.com ©2024JOEL CAUSTEXTRA MEDIUM