Leeds Digital Festival site launch

We love Leeds Digital Festival. It brings together all that is interesting about the digital industry in various venues across the city, including a few of our favourite pubs. Festivals should be social affairs after all.

So Tall were especially chuffed to be asked by the LDF team to create a new website for this year’s events. The festival needed to have a site that was designed around the events and making it easy for the user to find those that were of interest to them. We also needed to sharpen up the brand’s online identity and make it really feel digital.

A refreshed identity for 2017 had been created by Effective Publishing and Brendan Mcgawley. We worked with Brendan to ensure that the updated brand was beautifully implemented both offline and online.
With the growing popularity of the festival, 2017 expects the festival to be bigger and busier than ever (the current count standing at 50 events).

With this in mind, our focus was to create a festival site allowing people to quickly find out what’s on across the festival’s 8 days of events as well as allowing event organisers to easily submit. The mobile experience was a key consideration as site is expected to receive a large amount of mobile visitors, especially during the festival as people look to see what the nearest or next events are.

 

 

Here at Tall, we’re always keen to explore new ways of presenting digital information and offer a hat-tip to celebrate digital creativity. So for this project we implemented a graphical data visualisation to feature within the site which reflects the number of festival events and attendees. Subtle enough not to get in the way of what the user is wanting to do, but still able to give them a sense that the site is responding to them and the event content.

For the events, we wanted to make sure that people coming to find out more about the festival, didn’t end up feeling like it was just an ‘industry thing’. Digital is part of everyone’s lives and the festival aims to appeal accordingly. So, working with the LDF team, we created a set of categories that show off the wide range of topics covered by all the events, with scope to add more as the events list grows.

 

 

The site is completely content-managed to allow the client to add events, sponsors and blog news as the festival gathers pace. In less than 6 weeks, we got it live and it’s already getting lots of attention.

We will be signing up to a fair few of the events. Hope to see you there.
Book your place on the website www.leedsdigitalfestival.org.