The primary goal of the project was to create a system for festival attendees that would help them with logistics, and improve the discoverability of individual events.

Behind the visitor-facing site, we needed to create a platform that would effectively support the huge amount of content that would be added by different user groups, from festival organisers to partners setting up their own events pages.

Finally, the website needed to act as a scalable foundation that could evolve with future brand expression. It also needed to be able to change to suit its dynamic purpose throughout the year, from off-season to festival week.

The volume of events and the handling of multiple festival phases required a sophisticated approach to content management. From an editor’s perspective, the platform needed to be simple, fast, and user-friendly. From a technical perspective, endless extensibility and security were essential. We therefore built the LDF platform with the headless CMS Storyblok as it provided the perfect balance of a simple editing experience and live preview capabilities in a highly flexible package.

Behind the visitor-facing events website, we built a partner dashboard. This is an area where partners can add events, manage their company information, download supporting materials and resources, and pay for their tiered partnership packages.

The dashboard was developed in Ruby, using the Ruby on Rails framework, with dedicated error tracking and application monitoring by Honeybadger. This system alerts LDF if any errors occur during editing, and identifies which customers are affected so that fixes can be made instantly to ensure visitor experience is not negatively impacted.

The cornerstone of the LDF brand identity is the combination of a fixed framework that is activated by annual ‘campaign’ identities created by the world's largest independent design consultancy Pentagram. Their framework both responds to, and anticipates trends in design and typography. Our job was to build the digital canvas to which these campaigns can be applied with minimal effort from the LDF team.

Whilst the previous annual refresh process required extensive code changes  that were both time consuming and prone to error — replacing headers, banners and other supporting graphic assets — we created a new system that allows LDF to centrally manage all the assets and make content changes themselves.

We approached accessibility via inclusive design methodologies — instead of fixing accessibility issues towards the end of the build, the site is planned, designed and developed from the ground up to be accessible.

We gave LDF detailed guidance and control over key accessibility features, from optimising images for highest performance and lowest energy usage, setting up image alt texts, defining appropriate labelling and placeholders for forms and, utilising semantically correct headings, texts and backgrounds as standard.

We worked with our digital partner Koto on the UI designs for the personalisable visitor programmes. Here, we focused on creating user interfaces that were grounded in user-centred design principles. Together, we approached accessibility via inclusive design methodologies — instead of fixing accessibility issues towards the end of the build, the site was planned, designed and developed from the ground up to be accessible.

Our system gave LDF guidance and control over key accessibility features, such as setting up image alt texts to cater for visitors using screen readers. We defined appropriate labelling and placeholders for forms that utilised semantically correct headings, texts, and backgrounds. We also optimised imagery for the highest performance and lowest energy usage to reduce screen load times. The result is a highly responsive UI system that feels intuitive to visitors as they create their own festival programmes.