Botanic Gardens of Sydney
Experience the power of plants through digital design
Overview
As one of Australia’s oldest scientific institutions, the Botanic Gardens of Sydney (BGS) holds a special place in the history of NSW. Made up of three gardens and one open public space, including the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, it covers over 508 hectares of manicured gardens showcasing a plethora of plants from across Australia and around the world.
With millions of visitors to the gardens each year, and hundreds of millions of dollars contributed to the Australian economy, the Botanic Gardens of Sydney deserves a website that reflects its significance.
Four icons, one website
Folk was engaged to transform the digital presence of the gardens and consolidate three garden websites and one campaign microsite into a single engaging site that would promote the best of the gardens.
Working with the Botanic Gardens of Sydney team, we designed a website experience that showcases the power of plants, is fit for purpose in attracting visitors to the gardens and sharing knowledge, and supports more efficient processes and practices for staff.
The visual identity
Utilising a newly developed brand identity, we were able to build on the narrative of the gardens being a meeting place for people to learn, grow and explore.
The brand, developed by SWELL and strategy led by Destination Marketing Store, included a distinctive set of floral kaleidoscopes adapted from those held in the Florilegium Society botanical paintings collection, and a custom typeface, Garden Inktrap, which together work towards creating a unique, dynamic, and modern visual identity.
An explosion of colour
When your business is gardens, you get to play with lots of colour. We used the forever changing colours you see throughout the gardens, as the seasons pass, and the flora and fauna matures. It’s a constant evolution that was essential to replicate in the digital space.
We used the bright and expressive colour palette from the visual identity to its full effect.
The website has been built so that content editors can easily select a huge variety of colours that can match or contrast with the real gardens, helping to maintain the individual personalities of each of the four gardens.
A content strategy as digital fertiliser
Like a garden, a website is a complex ecosystem that needs to be maintained and cared for, but the user doesn’t need to see that. They need to get to content that solves their problems and is beautiful, as quickly as possible.
A significant driver for this piece of work was the consolidation of the three previously separate garden websites into a single, unified web experience.
The previous, individual sites had created significant duplication of content and inhibited cross-promotion or natural navigation across the different garden locations.
Our content strategy aimed to encourage people to explore and learn, by creating a site structure that grouped the content for each garden under sections that spoke to user needs and wants.
The information architecture uses shared topics such as ‘Venues & Spaces’ or ‘Discover & Learn’ to house content for all locations, inviting a user to enter a section of the site that speaks to their immediate needs, and greets them with a rich depth of content across all of the Botanic Gardens of Sydney spaces, rather than seeing content only specific to one.
By flipping the content model and simplifying entry points to information, we encourage users to explore and learn about everything the Botanic Gardens of Sydney offers through content cross-navigation.
Best practice design for an inclusive experience
The design of the website needed to showcase the new visual identity whilst meeting the highest standards of inclusive design, accessibility and UI/UX best practices.
We used the NSW Digital Design system as the foundation of the design, allowing us to utilise the accessible and inclusive components and patterns, built upon to reflect the expressive visual identity of the gardens.
This project received a prestigious Australian Good Design Award Winner accolade in 2024, in the Digital Design category for exceptional design and innovation.
