St Jerome's Laneway Festival
Digital Strategy
Experience Strategy
UI/UX Design
Accessibility Design
Design System
Interactive Style Guide
Webflow Development
Custom Development
Audience Republic Integration
Technical Consulting
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.
In collaboration with Bolster Group, Laneway 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.
Laneway'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.
01 Digital Strategy & Technical Consulting
02 UX Discovery & Strategy
03 UI/UX Design
04 Design System
05 Interactive Style Guide
06 Webflow Development
07 Custom Code & Integrations
We 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.
With 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.
The previous Laneway website required developers to edit content, which was not only inefficient but also unaligned with the rapid-fire pace of working with events. We decided to migrate their website to Webflow so that it was easy to use for all members of the team, not just the devs. In addition to a new CMS, Laneway needed their new website to launch on a strict timeline. The development needed to be quick, efficient and reliable - we leveraged Webflow's platform to achieve these requirements.
Laneway had several third party platform requirements that we were also able to integrate into their website quickly and with ease.
Festival's are fun - and the Laneway team wanted the website experience to reflect this. Incorporating experiential elements into the website's design like scrolling and transition animations helped us achieve this. These were all developed internally with the Extra Medium dev team using CSS and JS, and were designed to bring the festival artwork to life.
The custom mouse cursor and button interactivity are also noteworthy. Laneway really wanted the site’s to look and feel like a 90’s throwback but without compromise or sacrificing any user experience.
