Josh Attwood
Studio

Josh Attwood Studio redesigned and rebuilt the website for SHIFT into your future, a week-long online programme delivered in partnership with the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow School of Art and Queen Margaret University. Since 2019, SHIFT has helped over 500 creative graduates and final-year students build the practical and entrepreneurial skills needed to sustain a career in the arts and creative industries.

The project covered a full visual redesign, a rebuilt content strategy, and a new password-protected student portal used to run each year's programme.

Streamlining the story

The main focus of the redesign was clarity — making it immediately obvious what SHIFT is and what a week on the programme actually looks like. Alongside a new colour palette, typography and layout system, we rebuilt the content strategy around four elements: a clear top-level introduction, an existing film in which speakers explain the programme in their own words, a detailed speakers section, and an FAQ section written to carry much of the explanatory weight itself. Structuring the FAQs around the real, practical questions applicants have meant the site could explain more while saying less.

A student portal built around the week itself

Alongside the public site, we designed and built a password-protected student portal, issued fresh for each year's cohort. Rather than a static page of links, the portal is built around where a student is in the week: a countdown runs to the next session with its joining link, a prominent tile appears for anything currently live, and the full schedule sits below with resources relevant to the whole year's programme. Once a talk's end time passes, it moves automatically into a past events archive, where students can watch the recording back and download resources such as slides.

Automated from a single set of talk entries

The system was built to minimise backend admin. A single set of talk entries — linked by date and time — simultaneously populates the public schedule, the student portal schedule, and the past events archive, so the SHIFT team manage one entry per talk rather than updating three separate views. We also built an application system with an automatic cut-off date and time set by the team, closing applications without any manual intervention.

Built on Craft CMS.