Showcasing cutting-edge tech that's set to change the world

Background

Future Worlds is the on-campus startup accelerator at the University of Southampton. Their mission is to help the next generation of aspiring founders change the world with their ideas. Founded in 2015 Future Worlds has supported hundreds of aspiring entrepreneurs launch startups and raise millions of pounds.

The challenge

Future Worlds has been supporting early stage startups for many years. There are however many projects throughout the university that have the potential to be groundbreaking but are at a pre-startup stage. These projects do not fit the typical accelerator programme and Future Worlds needed a new proposition and way to communicate these projects.

As pre-startup research projects they typically don’t have individual brand identities or fully understood value propositions and so need to be presented in a different way to the typical cohort.

The solution

We partnered with the larger project team to create a dedicated Labs website. The site was designed to showcase pre-startup projects in a consistent manner, without the need for individual brand work to be completed. We utilised WordPress Multisite to make it easy for the Future Worlds team to create a presence for each project.

Co-design with wider project team

Discovery

The project team included internal stakeholders, a copywriter, graphic designer, videographer and our web team. The website was part of a broader launch plan which included video content and an event.

Working collaboratively we identified the required content and wireframed out a standard template that could be repeated across a wide variety of projects

Within the discovery phase we explored and created:

• Sitemap & Information architecture (IA)
• Wireframes
• Content types and restrictions
• Visual identity direction

Visual Identity & Theming

As the Labs site is a standalone project it needed to feel distinct from the main Future Worlds site, whilst also linking in with the main brand. As each of the featured projects are pre-startup they also wouldn’t have unique branding, so the site design needed to be visually interesting but flexible enough to cater for different use cases.

We decided to use the multiple colours found in the Future Worlds logo as accent colours for the site. Enabling each project to have a different coloured theme and for this to apply throughout the site. This ensured that each project felt consistent but still retained some differentiation.

WordPress Multisite

Using WordPress Multisite enabled Future Worlds content editors to quickly and easily create new projects when required. This one click solution reduced the manual work involved in setting up each new website, removing the need to register domains or setup DNS each time.

As each project was a standalone WordPress site, it also meant project members could be given editing access to their own pages, without needing access to other projects.