Room One

Room One is a London based cultural and arts institution with divisions for Theatre, Films, TV, Virtual Reality, Training and Art. Their space is also available for creators and performers to work out of. Through their activities, Room One produces massive amounts of content and events. They approached us to build a website that would bring together all the content, activities and services across the many verticals.

Our work started with structuring and architecting the site. Each of the 7 divisions need a unique architecture to best showcase the content they produced, the events they hosted and the services they offered. The Homepage of Room One acted as window to the most interesting content and activities across all divisions, while each division has its own homepage and unique inside page templates for content.

Dealing with this diversity became easier because of the strong visual language and UX patterns we created, as the foundational building blocks of the website. This modular approach ensured that navigating through the different divisions and their content blocks was a consistent and delightful experience for the user.

Our aesthetic approach was to keep the “design” to a minimum and let the content set the aesthetic style. So a largely monochromatic interface works well with a backdrop of dramatic, larger than life images and sets the right tone for Room One – as a platform for art and technology.

We chose WordPress as the CMS for its versatility and ease of use for content updates across different division. Each division has it’s own backend dashboard, created through WordPress’s Multisite functionality. This allowed for content to be updated in a more structured manner, rather than having multiple pages across different divisions put together. The site also has features such as a common calendar that brings together events from all divisions in a single intuitive interface.