A publishing platform for graphic design students at the University of the Arts London, built around a design by TwoMuch Studio.
GCD Studio is a public online magazine where students can showcase their coursework to the world. The platform needed to give students genuine creative freedom while giving staff the controls a university environment requires. Those two things pull in opposite directions, and getting the balance right shaped every decision in the build.
ACMSbuiltaroundcreativefreedom
Students can build pages from a block editor supporting text, image, video, audio and quiz content, and apply their own custom CSS to make each page feel entirely their own. Two page types serve different purposes: work pages owned by individual students with invited contributors, and community pages where anyone on the platform can add content.
Permissionsateverylevel
The platform runs a layered permission system across students, tutors and super admins. Admins can invite and block users, moderate pages and curate the homepage. It is the kind of infrastructure that needs to be invisible to the people using it daily but robust enough to run an entire academic cohort.
ScopedCSSwithoutthechaos
Student-authored styles needed to be genuinely expressive without bleeding across other students' work. Getting that boundary right, for users ranging from non-technical to very technical, required careful architectural thinking. Each page stays its own, however the student chooses to style it.