Leeds Trinity University Small but mighty

A small university with a big reputation, Leeds Trinity University is proud of the personal and inclusive experience it's been providing students for more than 50 years.

With a campus located just six miles from Leeds city centre, the university boasts a fantastic location in one of the UK’s most popular student cities.

After impressing with previous work for clients York St John and Keele University a successful tender process for Leeds Trinity’s Digital Design System Development project followed.

It was then all hands-on deck to ensure the new design was in place for the start of the university’s next big student recruitment cycle.

The Insight

Sustainability was a key factor for the project. Leeds Trinity didn’t have the capabilities to re develop its website every few years. With that in mind, we identified the need for a bank of content types – a collection of reusable and consistent user interface design elements that could be used across the site. The focus for content would cover student stories, the university’s USPs, its location and the courses on offer.

The project was running alongside an internal university project to migrate to a new content management system (TerminalFour) and search solution (Funnelback). Absolute’s experience with these platforms would allow us to provide effective solutions that could be integrated seamlessly.

The Idea

With in-house frustrations about the limitations of the existing website, we set out to provide the university’s digital team with a flexible and scalable design system that would assist their internal build processes and maintain a consistent, responsive experience for its users.

We wanted to demonstrate how their offline student recruitment campaign could translate into its digital offering. Helping to plug the gap in the campaign and place more focus on encouraging students to study at Leeds Trinity University.

The Delivery

Our bespoke Pattern Library system was an ideal candidate to deliver their design system having been developed and refined across a number of similar higher education projects and built based upon the principles of Atomic Design.

The Pattern Library contains live examples of each design element, showing how they should look and behave, as well as providing any associated HTML markup and supporting documentation.

An agile development approach between Absolute and Leeds Trinity's digital team was quickly implemented to ensure quick and efficient delivery of the new website and the new site successfully launched in February 2020 ahead of the 2021 recruitment cycle.