The Red Room Company is one of the more unique and innovative voices in Australian poetry. While the organisation continued to break new ground in location based and other alternative poetry interventions, it’s online presence was sorely lagging behind.
Artistic Director, Johanna Featherstone, approached us to create a more immersive online poetry experience that better reflected the essence of the company. In particular, she wanted to further engage poetry students as part of ‘Papercuts’ - NSW’s largest high school poetry program.
Working within significant budget constraints, we sought to maximise opportunities to improve the site’s design to ensure the best possible user experience while retaining the original look and feel. We simplified global design elements in order to draw the users attention to a new interactive poetry ‘player’ featured throughout the site which showcases written poetry, audio, video and photos.
Behind the scenes, the Red Room Company have the ability to curate poetry ‘playlists’ around common themes. We’ve also enabled the use of custom page backgrounds which add personality to the unique and interesting projects without the need for completely separate micro-sites. The updated design builds upon the previous design rather than completely replacing it, bringing the poetry to life and ensuring that the Red Room’s unique approach to poetry is complemented by an immersive and unique online presence.