The Queen’s Plate, sponsored by L’Ormarins Wine Estate, is a high stakes, high fashion equestrian event – hosted annually at the Kenilworth Racecourse in Cape Town.
For the 155th running of this prestigious event, L’Ormarins Queen’s Plate (LQP) wanted to update the look, feel and functionality of their website in order to keep their brand fresh and ensure an exceptional user experience.
LQP briefed Kri8it to redesign their website. It was agreed that we would explore a new illustrative style that was elegant and clean with a few subtle animated features. We created the illustrations from scratch, sketching out key elements that captured the LQP experience and developing an iconic visual language. While the illustrations had to be playful enough to capture the imagination of our audience, they also had to be simple so that the experience would be easy to navigate. The design and development team spent many hours planning how all the elements would fit together!
When developing the site, we chose to use WordPress with DMS (Design Management System) as the theme framework. This enabled us to handle most of the animations (all were generated in-house), as well as the different layouts, page styles and templates across the site.
This approach allowed us to streamline the development process. The loading sequence, loading time, and smoothness of the animations were of the utmost importance to us. We tweaked and changed, adding and removing elements, until we were happy with the result!
In the end, we succeeded in delivering an easily accessible, clean and stylish user experience – and most importantly, our client was happy with the result.
“I love the website, it looks wonderful! I can’t thank you enough for your hard work and patience! It really just makes me happy going onto it and scrolling through every section.” – Katherine Gray, L’Ormarins Queen’s Plate Co-ordinator