JTB Studios wins a 2026 Good Design Award for ANZSOG

The strongest public sector brands earn trust long before they ask for attention. They feel considered, they make complex information easy to reach, and they reflect the people they serve.

That belief shaped our work with the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG). The new ANZSOG brand and website has been named a winner in the Digital, Web Design and Development category of the 2026 Good Design Awards, Australia’s most prestigious international design awards.

The award recognises more than a website. It recognises a brand rebuilt from the ground up, grounded in research, designed with cultural respect, and engineered to grow.

The project was entered through our sister agency, Dobre, and delivered by the same team behind JTB Studios.

A new vision for a trusted institution

ANZSOG is a trusted partner to governments across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. It educates public sector leaders, publishes research, and convenes communities of practice across jurisdictions.

When newly appointed CEO Caron Beaton-Wells joined, she set a clear vision: lift how ANZSOG is perceived, and bring a brand to life that honours First Nations and Māori connection to land, water, and sky. The existing website had grown in layers. It had been migrated several times, carried legacy issues from each move, and made programs and research hard to find.

Discovery before design

We started by listening. Our discovery program brought together three stakeholder workshops, four focus groups with 18 staff, a survey of 18 stakeholders, and technical sessions with ANZSOG’s Chief Information Officer (CIO). We interviewed alumni, ran navigation testing, audited every piece of content, and benchmarked best-in-class course and event experiences.

The findings were clear. Users struggled with complicated navigation, found it hard to compare programs, and hit dead ends at the point of enrolment. Internally, teams needed better integration with the tools they rely on every day.

Together we set a north star: to make ANZSOG the definitive digital destination for public sector leaders. Every design and technical decision that followed was measured against it, and validated through user testing along the way.

A brand drawn from land, water, and sky

The new identity starts with a simple idea: nature isn’t a perfect square. Organic shapes replace rigid geometry, and a palette of Land Red, Water Teal, and Sky Blue draws on elements fundamental to First Nations and Māori worldviews.

At its heart sits a ripple. It reflects how support for one public servant extends outward, to the agencies they serve and the communities those agencies support. On the website, the ripple comes to life through animated lines that move with the user.

We commissioned original Indigenous artwork for the site, and considered every element, from typography to image selection, through the same lens of respect and connection.

Built to scale with a headless CMS

We built the platform on a headless architecture, with Storyblok as the Content Management System (CMS) and a React front end. That choice gives ANZSOG’s team an intuitive authoring experience, a modular component library they can assemble pages from, and the freedom to add rich motion without sacrificing performance.

The build connects directly to the systems ANZSOG already runs on. Zoho Backstage powers event ticketing, Salesforce captures every enquiry, and Algolia search helps users find programs and research in seconds.

Behind the scenes, we cleansed and migrated years of content carried across multiple previous platforms, so the new site launched clean, structured, and ready to grow.

Bringing the brand to the public

A new brand deserves a proper introduction. Alongside copywriting, photography, and image selection for the site, we produced a brand film and a launch campaign that ran across billboards in Canberra and on-demand TV.

Throughout, we worked with stakeholders at every level of the organisation, gathering insight from across teams and keeping leadership aligned from discovery to launch.

When we revealed the new site to more than 100 ANZSOG staff, the response said everything. Some were moved to tears by the change.

ANZSOG trusted us to look beyond a website and rethink how the organisation shows up for the people it serves. Every decision, from the ripple in the brand to the way content is structured, came back to what we heard in discovery. Watching ANZSOG’s team see their new brand for the first time meant as much to us as this award.

– Aaron Fraser, Digital Director

A partnership that keeps evolving

Launch was the beginning. Today we partner with ANZSOG on new components and tools for the site, ongoing maintenance and hosting, and marketing across paid search, paid LinkedIn, and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

What this means for complex organisations

For government, education, and enterprise organisations, the ANZSOG project shows what’s possible when brand and digital are designed together:

• Research de-risks the investment. Discovery gave every stakeholder a shared north star before a single screen was designed.
• Culture and identity can lead. A brand built on meaning, not decoration, gives people a reason to engage.
• The right architecture keeps you moving. A headless CMS lets your team keep evolving the site long after launch.

Read the full ANZSOG case study, or if you’re planning a brand or website for a complex organisation, let’s chat.