Custom Wordpress Development

QUT School of Design

QUT’s School of Design is an internationally recognised program, nurturing talented design students into successful graduates prepared for the real world. QUT offers Australia’s largest combination of creative disciplines and a wide array of industry partnerships with accolades being given across categories in teaching excellence and citations.

Pivoting the Challenges of Covid-19

An Engaging Online Student Showcase

With their end of year student showcase, QUT School of Design faced a common challenge in 2020 – how do we bring an in-person event online and keep it just as engaging, evocative and special for students and stakeholders? Pixel Palace was tasked with creating an interactive online platform which would let students upload their projects with ease and celebrate their hard work. The design needed to be consistent across the site, but allow each discipline to have a unique flavour. With a quick time frame with multiple stakeholders, Pixel Palace got to work.

Intelligent Design

Highlighting Student Work

For the platform, the Pixel Palace team built a custom WordPress theme using multisite for the different disciplines. A clean, minimal design style was implemented to ensure the student projects were the focal point of the site. A custom form allowed hundreds of students across multiple disciplines to build their projects in a flexible way and give them control over how their project was displayed, while still maintaining the minimalist style of the overall site for a consistent user experience. Projects were shown in a searchable grid for each discipline in a randomised order, rather than alphabetically to allow users to search for specific students or projects.

Streamlined Student Submissions

Each project was given its own unique link, so students were able to edit and preview their project throughout the submission period if they needed additional time. Included were different style options for buildable elements, subtle microinteractions throughout the site, plus a fireworks animation when students submitted their final versions.

Finally, a poll feature was added so there could be a ‘people’s choice’ vote for projects, engaging students, staff and stakeholders across disciplines.

"I would recommend Pixel Palace without hestitation. There is nothing I could fault with the team. We had a very complex project and they absorbed the complexity and gave us back clear and clever solutions by going above and beyond. It always felt like they were on our side and supporting what we needed to achieve in a tight time frame in this project."
Dr Rafael Gomez - Chair of Exhibition Commitee for QUT School of Design