VCA Design & Production 2023

The University of Melbourne is a university located in Melbourne, Australia. The Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) is the arts school within the university's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music.

I (Allan Pooley) worked alongside designer Byron Robertson from Bien Studio in order to create a digital experience that celebrated the work of students completing their final year of studies.

Our digital experience was to showcase a wide array of work: from studio work, to exhibitions, and performances from a range of creative disciplines, as the design and production faculty encompassed the Bachelor of Fine Arts (Production), the Bachelor of Design (Performance Design and Graphic Design), and the Master of Production Design.

Along with the VCA staff we were collaborating with, for the initial landing experience we converged upon a concept of a randomly generated canvas of student work, that would be procedurally generated each time the page was refreshed, such that every portfolio received equal opportunity for exposure.

The most important function of the site was to give the graduating students a platform to showcase their work and talents for opportunities outside of work. A portfolio of their work within the college, in addition to or until they created their own. So, we emphasised on a user interface that maximised the presentation student's work, with a gallery of images and videos of the work fit edge to edge on the screen, which could be simply navigated through.

We built a bookmarking functionality, so that talent scouts and recruiters browsing the exhibition could save graduates that might be recruited into productions and projects outside of VCA.

There are 110 graduate portfolios, and 22 productions and projects, counting. Sanity provided an ideal platform to structure that data into manageable fields and the various media capturing student work.