Royal College of Art Degree Show 2020
MTJ was contracted to develop the RCA2020 website by Unthinkable working alongside Platform 3.
MTJ created the front end website alongside the editorial back end interface, this was complemented by an instant search system with a very efficient image Content Delivery Network. The front end website was created with GatsbyJS and integrated with a custom back end for student submissions developed by Platform 3. Careful consideration of the best modern technologies made this site extremely fast, standards-compliant and accessible. The website smartly utilises modern progressive web app technologies allowing it to operate offline and work excellently on mobile devices.
Over 800 students contributed work to the website with RCA staff and guest contributors providing hundreds of collections, events and stories. Multiple back end systems – each tailored to its own task – were combined to allow for streamlined student upload, editorial and contributions from guest curators. Instant search allows users to rapidly jump to any part of the website. The Content Delivery Network was used to upload the student images: in the first few days alone this allowed us to store around 50GB of images and serve over a terabyte of image data.
A truly rewarding aspect of the project was working with a fantastic team of students from the Royal College of Art to integrate their designs into a responsive, fast and considered user experience.