We created a digital platform for the Sydney Review of Books with a key goal: to maintain their position at the forefront of digital publishing.

In collaboration with Public Websites, we built SRB a new home, featuring a full site redesign and an updated FVS-powered visual system. We changed tech stack to migrate to a headless CMS, using Algolia to turn their extensive digital archive into a quickly and easily searchable index.

Four years after building their original site, Sydney Review of Books asked us to update their digital platform with a new look, a new tech stack, and increased functionality for sharing their extensive online database of articles, interviews, essays, and reviews.

The standout design challenge in this project was to update the visual system in a way that both represented the client’s brand and that was flexible enough to be applied successfully to illustrate hundreds of articles, essays, interviews, and fiction.

Migrating their archive from Wordpress to Prismic, we were able to index all the content, making the content all searchable and filterable by Algolia. Once this was in place, we scaffolded a headless build with Next.js, Prismic, and Netlify and set to work building a site to match Public’s freshly updated designs.

To solve the need for a dynamic and reusable design system for the site, we built a separate, fully functional generative design tool, a custom extension of our work based on Martin Lorenz’s Flexible Visual Systems. Despite representing a small part of the client’s budget, this tool was a key element in the overall rehaul and rebranding of the site. In short, we created a flexible design system that randomly creates a unique yet identity-driven image for each and every piece of content on the site.

Read Will Mclean’s full article explaining the FVS tool in detail, on the SRB website.