Design Week

Revitalise a well-established digital publishing brand within the design industry. Review and completely restructure over 60,000 existing articles. Migrate the legacy content to a new platform, ensuring content is easier to discover and key user experiences are improved.

We refreshed Design Week's brand identity, using it as the foundation for the visual language of the new site design. The aim was to appeal to modern audiences while honouring the brand's rich heritage. We migrated the content to our Standfirst platform, where we rationalised and completely restructured the content architecture, supported by a custom-developed AI tool.

Before applying AI to review the site, we used Figma to map out the content structure of the website and the taxonomies we would use. This groundwork allowed us to create prompts that guided the AI in analysing, structuring, and categorising the content in a way that could be integrated into our system. It also provided vital context for our designers and developers as we transitioned from the discovery phase to building the site.

We used the latest AI technology to streamline the traditionally time-consuming process of content review for migration. Our team created a PHP script to analyse the entire website and send batches of posts to OpenAI for categorisation. What would have taken a human 3,000 hours to complete across 57,000 posts was accomplished in just 120 hours. This not only saved significant time but also enhanced content discovery, increasing page views per visit by 20%.

The challenge was to refresh the Design Week site’s ageing design while retaining its core identity. Drawing inspiration from the Bauhaus movement—Design Week’s founding influence—we developed a new brand identity, updating typography, colour palettes, and design elements to bring a modern feel without losing the essence of the original brand.

We introduced a more varied homepage layout with different content blocks to increase visual interest and improve navigation. Optimising for larger screen sizes, we incorporated large imagery and full-width elements to create an immersive experience. We also prioritised content discoverability, displaying images in their original aspect ratios and simplifying the site’s mega menu and navigation to make key content sections easier to find. Additionally, categories at the bottom of articles, such as disciplines and brands, improved wayfinding and content organisation.