Royal College of Art website launched

We were delighted to win the four-way pitch for UX consultancy. Better still, we ended up building the whole site and creating an exciting new CMS, which we will be open sourcing - look out for more on this soon.

The RCA is one of the most inspiring and exciting organisations I could hope to work with. They totally embraced our collaborative, agile approach to running a project and my thanks go to their project leader, Octavia Reeve, who has been fantastic, and the wonderfully acronymed Web Task Force project board.

Even better, we worked with Research Studios, Neville Brody's design outfit, who delivered all the visual design. As well as having designed the BBC website (alongside all the other things that have made him one of the best-known graphic designers in the UK), Neville is the Dean of the School of Communications at the RCA and recent RCA Visual Communication graduate, Jack Llewellyn, was a core member of the design team.

We had a couple of significant changes of direction, most notably RCA's decision, mid-project, to abandon Squiz CMS and commission us to develop a new CMS and implement the site on it. Despite these we were delighted to launch the project on schedule for the key 2014 REF deadlines.

My thanks also go to everyone who worked on our project team: Chris Rogers, Matthew Westcott, Dave Cranwell, Helen Chapman, Karl Hobley, Balazs Endrezs, Nick Smith.

The RCA site is driven by our new, blazing fast Python/Django CMS, which we will be launching as an open source project in early 2014. It integrates with EPrints for research records, and the College's LDAP server for authentication; it uses Stripe for donations, Elasticsearch for, um, search, Eventbrite for event booking, and it drives the screens around the College that tell students and staff what events are happening, every day.

Thousands of images and records were imported from the previous site including all show data and profiles on previous students, current researchers, staff, images of artworks, research records, and news. The site is responsive and optimised for desktop, tablet and mobile.

If you'd like to find out more about the Royal College of Art website, or would like to discuss your exciting project, please don't hesitate to get in touch.