We built a modular website with a CMS and custom flexible asset creation tool for Australian collective, Living Lab Northern Rivers.

Together with Public Websites, we built a new site for Australian collective, Living Lab Northern Rivers. We dug into our library of flexible modules and combined them with a custom built asset generation tool to deliver a fast, light, and searchable website with a strong visual identity.

Moving away from a sprawling Squarespace theme that they had outgrown, they needed a site that could accommodate their needs to promote and index their events, workshops, projects, and articles, which could be easily updated with content by different team members while staying true to a strong and consistent designed identity.

We needed to create a website that prioritized both function and coherence of visual identity.

The answer to this: building a transformational shift tool, allowing LLNR to upload an image to the tool, then play with a set of defined variables to create large numbers of designed variants of that image, all of which could be used throughout the website and beyond.

The tool works by breaking the image container up into a variable grid, and allowing the user to edit different parts of that grid, including shifting individual columns or rows of that image, interspersing overlaid defined brand colour pairings over the image with different bias, optionally adding overlaid text, background colours, and so on.

These assets can then be exported into different relevant formats for Living Lab (instagram square, hero background image, website banner, flexible card instances), giving them essentially limitless options to communicate with their audience across a range of channels, contexts, and formats.

As well as being smartly designed and visually appealing, the site of course had to be primarily functional. We built this on the ultra-lightweight and dependable headless configuration of Next.js and React, with a Prismic CMS, hosted on Netlify.

Finally, to allow for easy navigation of their team and work archives, we hooked up Algolia search and filter functionality, giving them full control to add, edit, or delete filter tags and types as they see fit.