Case study · Luiss Guido Carli
Luiss a university's digital presence, rebuilt as an ecosystem.
Multibrand design system, agentic AI search, Drupal CMS, cloud native infrastructure.
The Luiss design system
A major university steps into a new digital era.
A digital experience rebuilt from the ground up, around a generation that searches and studies in new ways.
Not a website. A system.
One design system dresses the corporate site and, in the future, an ecosystem of hundreds of sites. Without duplicating anything.
Foundations
Open Day 2026
The same component, different foundations. A single source of truth for the whole ecosystem.
ApplyThe brand identity becomes a living design system, wired directly into the site's code. The brand stops being a static document and becomes a living part of the product: consistent everywhere, updatable from a single point, the source of truth from which everything follows.
A university is measured, in part, by the quality of its digital experience. With this project we choose to combine technology and design as part of our identity, not as an add-on service.
From 65,000 →
25,000 pages
A leaner structure: content that is easier to find and to manage. A university website carries real weight: it has to serve very different audiences at the same time, students and prospective students, faculty, researchers, families, external partners, each with their own expectations and very little patience for friction.
The previous platform mirrored the complexity of the institution instead of resolving it. We started with people: more than 120 interviews (conducted by Altura Labs) and over 20 offices involved, across 15 months of work. From there, a content architecture redesigned from scratch and a more rational UX brought the pages from 65,000 down to around 25,000, removing duplicates, obsolete content and sections that were no longer relevant, and making what remains findable.
UX · wireframe
UI · final
Drag to compare · from UX to UI
What you design is what goes live.
An integrated system, in a continuous loop between design and code. The usual friction between design and development teams gives way to consistency, effectiveness and quality of the result. Orchestrating two worlds with different rhythms and logics is hard: our ability to align them in a single direction is what removes bottlenecks and turns complexity into simplicity.
A new site on your own, in minutes.
With the self provisioning platform, Luiss can spin up a new site in the ecosystem on its own (a department site, for example) from a preconfigured dashboard: minutes instead of weeks, with the design system and security already built in. Launching a site becomes an operation, no longer a project.
Every new site is born from a master template: consistency is guaranteed natively, and security updates propagate to every replica from a single point. Governance of the ecosystem stays centralized and control stays in the university's hands. That is freedom: complexity turned into simplicity.
Searching has become
asking.
Students and prospective students are used to asking an AI and getting instant answers. The platform's search speaks the same language: conversational, zero-click, precise because it is anchored to the university's own content.
Adopting an innovative platform built on open technologies gives us full autonomy and flexibility: a strategic choice that lets us shape our digital services and evolve them in line with the University's real needs.
The technology stays with the university.
Drupal is the central engine for the entire content lifecycle. Beneath it, a Cloud Native infrastructure for top-tier performance, with security built into both development and production. An Open Source ecosystem that gives the university full Digital Sovereignty and control over all of its assets.
It is a project that touches themes now at the center of public debate: digital sovereignty, open source and the way institutions stay findable and correctly represented in the age of AI.
The content architecture is optimized for search engines and AI models (SEO and GEO), so the educational institution stays findable and correctly represented wherever people search today.
Luiss takes a deliberate stance, treating technology and design as strategic assets: a forward-looking posture in the Italian university landscape that shows it is attuned to the most current digital themes. The same modules developed for Luiss then flow back to the international Drupal community: the platform does not just use technology, it helps define it.
What matters is not a website, but the platform: design system, application and infrastructure, designed and managed as a single system. We built it on open source and open standards because an institution like Luiss must be able to run its own technology, not depend on a provider.
A new multibrand design system. A digital presence modernized from the ground up.
A project of this complexity comes from a chain of diverse, complementary skills working in synergy.
The people who built the platform contribute to Drupal.
SparkFabrik is a Drupal Certified Partner Gold, the first Italian company to earn it. The team behind the project builds and maintains Drupal modules, many dedicated to AI. The same tools shared with the international community run on Luiss's platform.
The vision
A coherent brand architecture, for a university that speaks with one voice.
Every future digital project at Luiss starts here, not from a blank page.