The Client
The City of Brisbane is a local government area that has jurisdiction over the inner portion of the metropolitan area of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, Australia.

The Situation
In early 2018, Brisbane City Council invited residents to help shape the city’s next chapter. Through more than 20 types of engagement activity, including an online game and a series of forums and surveys, more than 100,000 people provided feedback generating more than 15,000 ideas.

Applying these ideas, the council developed a document called Brisbane's Future Blueprint with eight principles to guide decisions and ensure the city thrives.

Council’s digital team were tasked with finding an innovative way to present the detailed document plan as a thoughtful digital experience. The aim was to convert the otherwise dense document into something meaningful, transparent and accessible to all residents of Brisbane.

The Challenge
The biggest challenge for the council’s digital team was creating an overall experience that projected the energy and passion a static PDF cannot covey. The team also had large amounts of content to provide to its audience, finding a clear and seamless way to show off all that content was a challenge in itself. To allow for richer storytelling experience, the design did not display all the content upfront, instead the layout put mixed media like images and video at center stage.

Whilst the most important content was displayed in the main page, secondary content could be explored via an image-based slideshow pop-out, to create a more interactive experience for users. When displaying content the team opted for bold, clear typography, with strong contrast and generous whitespace, to support a pleasant, uncluttered reading experience.

Finally, the entire experience needed to be responsive enough to be viewed on-the-go across all devices and accessible to all users.

The Solution
A great deal of consideration went into the look and feel of the experience, with the council’s digital team working closely with other internal stakeholders to ensure all expectations and requirements were met, while still producing something unique for a local government website.

After wireframing, Brisbane's in-house developers began designing the fundamentals of the page visuals. Standard plugins were extended with custom code in order to create a distinct user interface and the bespoke responsive design was fully manageable via the Drupal CMS. In terms of build tools, the team relied on HTML, CSS, Sass, Gulp and jQuery.

To ensure ongoing content management was timely and efficient, all of this had to be deployed on an enterprise-class content management system (CMS). The team opted to keep using the council’s existing Drupal/Acquia solution.

Acquia’s platform allows the development team to easily test changes and implement fixes with minimal disruption. The security focus of Acquia aligns closely with the council’s risk and security policy, greatly streamlining the approval process. The infrastructure that Acquia provides allows security updates and developmental changes to be easily tested and quickly and efficiently deployed. Marketing channels used by the council are far-reaching and highly effective. These channels are extremely efficient at driving traffic to the site and Acquia’s platform is resilient enough to be flexibly scaled according to demand.

The Results

• 9,735 visitors
• The average time on the page is 6 minutes and 19 seconds
• 3,549 downloads of the Brisbane's Future Blueprint