About our client
The L’Ormarins Queen’s Plate Racing Festival is a prestigious annual equestrian event that has been a highlight on the Cape Town racing and social calendar since 1861. Rated as one of the world’s top five horse-racing events by The Telegraph, UK – the festival attracts punters and celebrities, dressed in their blue and white best, from all over South Africa and further afield.
It’s a truly world-class celebration of equestrian excellence and haute couture.
Business challenge
For the 155th (2016) running of this high-fashion, high-stakes event, L’Ormarins Queen’s Plate (LQP) briefed Kri8it to update the look, feel and functionality of their website. Having designed and developed previous iterations of their site, we have the brand knowledge and market insights to continue updating this platform strategically and in line with emerging design and user experience trends.
Design approach
This time around, our client asked us to follow a more illustrative style, while keeping their website clutter-free and easy to navigate.
After conducting in-depth research on illustrative approaches that worked well with modern user experience best practice, we developed a unique, fresh and elegant style that stands out online yet also captures the fashion-forward spirit of the festival itself. We incorporated this into a fluid website layout that gives us room to include detailed illustrations without marring the user experience or making the site feel too busy.
One key challenge was creating a scene that portrays all the glamour, adrenaline and entertainment that the LQP event manages to roll into one unforgettable festival. This was a time-consuming process, but all the extra hours of research and exploration were worth it. Our client was really delighted to see all our illustrations come together as a unit.
From here, we animated certain elements to give the site a more dynamic feel – without allowing the animations to become a distraction.
Development
Our developers built the website using WordPress, with the Document Management System (DMS) plugin, due to its ability to handle the front-end content management and subtle transitions between each element.
The horizontal parallax scrolling feature and the selected animated elements create a more dynamic feel, without allowing all these moving parts to become a distraction. By bringing the illustrations to life in an elegant way, we managed to capture the excitement of this festival – with its bustling crowd, high speed races and live entertainment, without losing any of the glamour.
Results
A sleek, user-friendly digital platform that delights visitors and provides them with all the information they need about this much-anticipated event.
“The new website was met with such positive review, and all the artwork, design and branding was brilliant. Your team have a work ethic where you really go the extra mile, something that makes a huge difference to my job, and you work with such a good ethic, professionalism and passion that I truly think resonates and is translated to everyone who experiences various parts of LQP, from website to design and marketing and print on the day.”
Katherine Gray
L’Ormarins Queen’s Plate Coordinator
