Case Study - The Pool Collective

Artfully Engineered for Speed and Visual Impact

The Pool Collective represents some of Australia’s most visionary image-makers — photographers, directors, and multidisciplinary creatives who produce work that’s both boundary-pushing and meticulously crafted.

To match this standard, their website had to do more than just look good. It needed to perform beautifully. Codacora partnered with The Pool Collective to replatform their digital presence, combining headless architecture, visual performance optimisation, and editorial flexibility into one cohesive experience — without ever distracting from the work.

A Platform Worthy of the Work

Every piece of content on The Pool Collective’s site — from lush photo series to richly produced video — had to take centre stage. That meant removing friction, reducing distractions, and keeping the visual hierarchy minimal and deliberate.

We redesigned the front-end experience around three key principles:

• Visual Primacy: Let the content breathe. White space, large format imagery, and balanced layouts guide the eye without noise.
• Speed Without Sacrifice: All content — including high-resolution video — loads quickly and responsively, regardless of device or bandwidth.
• Editor Empowerment: The team can publish and update features with ease, using a modular, component-based content builder designed for flexibility.

The result is a site that feels effortless but is engineered with precision.

Headless CMS with Creative Freedom

We migrated The Pool Collective to a headless CMS setup, giving their team the tools to create rich, editorial-style layouts without relying on developers for every update.

Highlights:

• Custom Modular Content Builder: Editors can compose visually distinctive pages by arranging and reusing design blocks like galleries, quote sections, full-bleed videos, and carousels.
• Content Relationships: Projects, artists, and media are dynamically linked — making exploration seamless and reducing duplication.
• Versioning & Previews: Built-in controls for staging and review, ensuring content is always pixel-perfect before it goes live.

This structure allows for maximum creativity while ensuring consistent brand presentation across the site.

High-Performance Video and Image Delivery

To ensure The Pool Collective’s work loads beautifully everywhere — from desktops to spotty mobile connections — we applied a multi-layered optimisation strategy:

• Image & Video CDN: Assets are served via a global content delivery network, with automatic compression and multiple resolution breakpoints.
• Lazy Loading & Preloading: Visual elements load only when needed, while critical assets get priority — improving perceived speed.
• Web-Optimised Formats: Videos use adaptive bitrate streaming; images are served in modern formats like WebP for supported browsers.
• Aspect-Aware Cropping: Ensures visual consistency across devices without compromising focal points or composition.

This setup ensures that users get an immersive experience — without long waits, buffering, or degraded quality.

Seamless Navigation for Visual Storytelling

The site’s navigation is minimal by design but powerful in execution. We created a structure that supports both deep browsing and quick discovery:

• Contextual Transitions: Subtle animations and page transitions preserve immersion between projects.
• Intuitive Filters: Users can explore by artist, medium, or style, helping them discover work organically.
• Mobile-First Fluidity: Every layout was built to adapt elegantly across breakpoints, without compromise.

Whether a user lands on the site for a quick scan or a deep dive, the experience remains fluid and intentional — like turning pages in a beautifully designed book.

Outcome: A Digital Space That Matches the Craft

The new Pool Collective site doesn’t just showcase creative work — it amplifies it. By building a fast, elegant, and future-proof platform, we gave their team the freedom to publish and evolve, and their audience the space to linger and explore.

Now, every visit to The Pool Collective is a reminder that the web can be both technically advanced and artistically reverent — a gallery that moves at the speed of story.