Aquatics Team
A competitive swim club, given the site it would need — designed and built end to end as a self-directed concept.
- Self-directed concept
- Design and build
- Aquatics Team
- 2026
- Youth sport, membership clubs
- Figma and Lovable
A club site that answers what a swim parent actually turns up wanting to know.
Aquatics Team is a self-directed concept — a year-round competitive swim club, given the site it would need. There is no client behind it. It exists to take an idea the whole way: designed in Figma, built in Lovable, and left running rather than presented as a picture of a website.
Club sites tend to be noticeboards. A parent arrives with three questions — where would my swimmer fit, when is the next meet, and what is this going to cost us in time — and usually has to dig for all three. The concept puts each of them on the surface, and is deliberately blunt about the last one.
- The whole thing: information architecture, interface design and the build
- A five-group progression written as one legible ladder
- Meet cards that count down, with venues and entry deadlines attached
- Coach profiles carrying philosophy, credentials and specialisms
- A families section covering registration, entries, volunteering, travel and the handbook
- Tryout, join-the-staff and sign-in flows
The questions the concept had to answer.
- 01How might we let a parent see where their swimmer would actually fit, before they ever speak to a coach?
- 02How might we make a season legible — the next meet, the venue and the deadline, rather than a calendar to decode?
- 03How might we state the real commitment — sessions a week, meets a season, timing shifts — without it reading as a warning?
- 04How might a club with one part-time administrator keep a site like this current?
- 05How might a design go all the way to something running, instead of stopping at a picture of it?
Six areas of design work.
One ladder, five rungs
- Bronze to National as a single progression, not five unrelated squads
- Every group states its practice days, its coach, its season goal and its commitment
- The step between groups is legible, so nobody has to ask what comes next
A season you can read
- Meets carried as cards with a live countdown rather than a date inside a PDF
- Championship, qualifier, invitational and dual labelled, so the stakes are obvious
- Venue, session times and the entry deadline attached to the meet itself
Coaches as people
- Each coach given their own words on how they coach, above the credentials
- Certification level and seasons on deck stated plainly beside the specialisms
- A route to contact the coach who would actually take your swimmer
Honest about what it costs
- Sessions a week and meets a season attached to the group, where the decision is made
- The four timing sessions every family covers said out loud, not buried in a handbook
- Registration, entries, volunteering, travel and the handbook gathered in one place
Something to come back for
- A deck report carrying meet recaps, team announcements and coach updates
- A season gallery filtered by meets, training, dryland, underwater, travel and team life
- Season totals kept current, so the front page has a reason to change
Designed and built in the same pass
- Figma for the thinking, Lovable for the build, and no hand-off between them
- Anything that could not actually be built did not survive the week
- The result is a running site with real routes — schedule, coaches, tryouts, careers and a signed-in dashboard — rather than a flat comp
A concept that runs.
It is a site, not a picture of one. The countdowns count, the gallery filters filter, the forms take input, and the routes behind the navigation are real pages.
The commitment is on the surface. Practice days, session counts, meets per season and the timing shifts a family owes are stated where the decision gets made, rather than discovered later.
It is a method as much as an output. Designing and building in one pass keeps the design honest — there is no stage at which something unbuildable can quietly survive.