The Leeds International Piano Competition

The Leeds International Piano Competition has established itself as one of the world’s leading music competitions. Since its inception in 1963, it has been a pioneering force on the global stage, shaping the world of classical piano and setting new standards for international music competitions.

Brief Overview

The Leeds International Piano Competition (‘The Leeds’) strives to be the world’s most innovative and influential music competition. With a commitment to digital innovation, The Leeds explores creative approaches to live, digital, and hybrid formats, connecting with the broadest possible audience. They are dedicated to creating a fairer, more sustainable environment for competitors and are on track to become the world’s first carbon-neutral music competition by 2024.

The Leeds envisions enriching lives through the piano, focusing on three key areas: Competition, City, and Children and Young People. The competition’s school programme plays a vital role in engaging local children and young people with the piano, offering support to teachers and providing valuable resources for music education in schools.

A primary objective for the website was to modernise The Leeds’ image, encouraging future applicants, boosting ticket sales, and streamlining access to their videos and live competitions directly from the site.

Background

The previous website was seven years old and lacked cohesion across its pages, failing to meet the needs of both the organisation and its users. Outdated in design, it struggled to create an immediate emotional connection, falling short of inspiring visitors to book tickets or engage with the competition. The inconsistency between the site’s internal pages and external landing pages, such as those directed to streaming hosts, resulted in a confusing user experience.

Moreover, The Leeds logo and brand needed a refresh, as the logo’s thin typography made it less accessible.

The Challenge

Creating a completely refreshed website was essential to inspire, engage, and connect with the target audience of music lovers and potential competition applicants. It was also crucial to develop an intuitive content management system, allowing The Leeds staff to easily update event information and calendar listings, with direct links to external payment options for donations and ticket sales, as well as embedded viewing options for audio, video, and archive content. The site needed to be translatable into Chinese, Korean, German, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese.

We are also committed to building the website on accessibility principles and ensuring that its carbon footprint is kept to a minimum.

An Identity For The Old And The New

The Leeds challenged us to develop a new visual brand identity that reflects the competition’s heritage and prestige while appealing to modern audiences and musicians. To achieve this, we combined a traditional Garalde-inspired serif font with a contemporary sans-serif, creating a distinctive contrast of styles in the headline copy. This blend of styles subtly nods to both heritage and modernity, while maintaining a harmonious visual balance.

A Logo to be Seen

The old Leeds logo lacked balance, and its long name caused legibility issues when viewed at smaller sizes. For the new logo, we set out to design an instantly recognisable logomark paired with a highly legible logotype. Our goal was for both the logomark and logotype to be easily identifiable on their own, while appearing balanced and dynamic when used together in the full lockup.

"The old design was tailored to a more traditional and formal audience. The new visual brand identity aims to attract a younger, more diverse audience while preserving the competition's prestige and heritage. We achieved this balance of old and new by developing a bold and striking colour palette, complemented by a blend of contrasting typefaces."

User Experience

We adopted a collaborative approach during the UX phase of the project. Working closely with the Leeds team, we conducted multiple UX workshops to develop user profiles, establish the site structure and information architecture, and align key stakeholders on the primary goals and functions of the site. The UX deliverables included:

User Personas
Sitemap
Wireframes
User Flows

Media Hub

The Leeds has an extensive catalogue of multimedia, featuring competitions and artists spanning over 60 years. Our solution was to create a ‘Media Hub’ to showcase this vast library of content. The hub is designed to highlight the most relevant, featured content while ensuring easy navigation and access to past material. A dynamic filtering system enables users to search by media type, competitor, competition year, composer, and round. It also offers quick access to winning performances dating back to 1963.

Get Involved

The Leeds champions piano by embracing new ways to help audiences experience the magic of the competition, both locally in-person and on a global digital scale. With the competition taking place every three years, the Leeds sought a way to keep users returning to the site, even outside of competition periods. We supported them in developing the ‘Get Involved’ section of the site, aimed at schools and local communities to encourage participation in events and activities. The easy-to-manage events feed enables the Leeds team to quickly update upcoming events, offering users a straightforward and clear booking process.

Donations, Sponsors and Members

The Leeds relies on the generous support of donations, as well as the backing of its members, patrons, and sponsors. Previously, the donation process was complicated, creating barriers for those wishing to support the Leeds. During the UX phase, we designed a streamlined donation flow and introduced prompts during the regular checkout process. We also created a ‘Support’ landing page highlighting the real-life impact of donations on the Leeds. In our experience, showing potential supporters the tangible results of their contributions helps encourage repeat support.

Multi-Lingual Support

The Leeds is an international competition, welcoming competitors and audiences from around the world, both online and in person. A key requirement from the Leeds team was to ensure the new site had multilingual support. We implemented functionality allowing the site to be translated into Chinese (Mandarin), Korean, German, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese without relying on external translation tools that could disrupt the site’s styling.

Accessibility

Whether a competitor or an audience member, The Leeds is proud to welcome everyone to their competition and therefore requires a website that is accessible to all. We carried out extensive accessibility testing to ensure the site meets WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards.

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Notable Features

The newly designed Leeds website features a dynamic ‘Media Hub’ for exploring a vast multimedia archive with advanced filtering options. It includes a streamlined donation flow and a ‘Support’ landing page that highlights the impact of contributions. The site meets WCAG 2.1 Level AA standards for accessibility and supports multiple languages, including Chinese (Mandarin), Korean, German, Spanish, Russian, and Japanese, without affecting its styling. Additionally, it has an easy-to-manage events feed and a ‘Get Involved’ section to engage schools and local communities. The design balances tradition with modernity through a bold colour palette and contrasting typefaces, ensuring a visually striking and functional experience.

"I just wanted to start by saying a huge thank you to you all for all your hard work. I’m very aware we set an ambitious deadline for The International Leeds Piano Competition project, but you put in a lot of hard work to deliver this for us which is really appreciated. I know that small tweaks and changes are actually difficult and time-consuming to do, so I’d like to thank you for doing all of these so quickly, it really hasn’t gone unnoticed. I am beyond happy with the look and all of the features on the website, which is so much better than anything else in our sector and a real testament to your design and development skills. I can’t wait to recommend Chaptr... Again, thank you so much, you’ve been a joy to work with."

David Taylor
The Leeds International Piano Competition