A unique digital experience to bring a community to life with Gippslandia

Gippslandia is a community non-profit publication. They highlight local makers and creatives, curating an ever-optimistic take on regional, national and global issues, in a local context. This website redevelopment project aimed to engage the current audience, while also fostering a more vibrant, inclusive, and active Gippslandia community. The team also wanted to support the future of the publication through an online store which needed to be part of our technical solution. Alongside the technical requirements and a new look and feel, we prioritised flexibility in site components and efficient web management processes.

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. We leveraged their ideas on both brand and user value to bring the publication to life online. We worked with their team to refine their information architecture and proposed a site structure and taxonomy that would support future content findability. After establishing the information architecture and site structure we translated this into the structure of the CMS to validate our approach.

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.

We leveraged the strong editorial focus of Gippslandia's digital content and focussed our efforts on finding ways to design content so it was findable, connected and engaging at each level of the experience. 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.