Blending Academia with Design: Sixeleven’s Work on OTTO Earns Netty Awards Nomination

Sixeleven, a digital design studio based in Italy, has been nominated for a Netty Award in the category of Best News & Media Web Design for its standout work on OTTO—the online magazine of the University of Turin. The project combines immersive storytelling with clean, intuitive design to reimagine how academic and cultural content is shared online. With a sharp focus on accessibility, engagement, and creative presentation, OTTO is setting a new standard for how university publications connect with the wider public. Here’s a closer look at what makes this project so deserving of its recognition.

Innovation and Differentiation

What sets OTTO apart is its ability to merge editorial storytelling with digital innovation in a way that feels both seamless and refreshing. The magazine departs from the typical university journal format by leaning heavily into multimedia storytelling—combining videos, podcasts, and data visualizations within its articles. This layered approach adds depth and dimension to complex topics, making them more approachable and engaging to a broader audience.

Beyond format, OTTO fosters collaboration between students, researchers, and external contributors, giving the platform an active, living quality that reflects diverse perspectives from within and beyond academia. The design allows these voices to co-exist under a unified editorial direction, resulting in a vibrant online space that brings institutional content into real-world conversations. By rethinking both the editorial structure and the user experience, Sixeleven has built a platform that goes beyond design—it serves as a digital bridge between knowledge and community.

Measurable Impact and Success

Since the site’s relaunch at the end of 2024, the results have been clear: audiences are not only arriving in larger numbers, they’re staying longer and engaging more deeply. In the first few months of 2025 alone, OTTO saw a 129% increase in visits compared to the previous year, along with a 40% jump in the number of pages viewed. These aren’t just vanity metrics—they indicate that readers are navigating the platform with interest and curiosity, exploring more content than ever before.

Qualitative feedback has backed up the numbers. In user interviews conducted post-launch, participants consistently praised the site’s clean design, ease of navigation, and overall readability. Whether they were students, faculty members, or external visitors, users expressed appreciation for how the new layout made exploring academic content feel less intimidating and more enjoyable. The site’s structure encourages exploration, and the design choices have clearly contributed to higher engagement and stronger reader retention.

Creative Elements and Execution

The creative strategy behind OTTO is rooted in a simple idea: storytelling should be immersive, not overwhelming. From the start, Sixeleven took a fresh approach to web publishing—eschewing clunky menus and academic jargon in favor of clear structure and modern design. The homepage and article templates are clean and visually driven, using imagery and white space to guide the eye rather than crowd it.

One of the site’s most inventive elements is its “immersive article” format, which weaves together text, video, and audio into a single cohesive experience. This multimedia layering allows complex academic subjects to unfold in a more intuitive and human way. Users can move through stories at their own pace, deepening their understanding through different content formats. The team also tackled a challenge that many university sites face—how to serve a wide variety of readers. Their solution? A content filtering system that allows users to browse by theme, department, or media type. It’s a small feature with a big impact, making the site feel more personalized and easier to navigate.

Overall Excellence and Industry Advancement

OTTO represents a shift in how institutions think about digital publishing—not just as a way to broadcast information, but as a tool for engagement, dialogue, and exploration. The site’s development process involved a collaborative effort between Sixeleven, the university, students, and external partners, ensuring that the final product reflected the needs and expectations of its diverse audience.

From an execution standpoint, the project’s commitment to accessibility, intuitive design, and editorial creativity positions it as a benchmark for academic media going forward. It shows that high-quality, university-driven content can feel fresh, dynamic, and even fun—without compromising intellectual depth. In the broader design world, OTTO is an example of how thoughtful user experience and content architecture can bring traditional institutions into the digital age in meaningful ways.

About Sixeleven Srl

Sixeleven is a digital creative agency based in Turin, Italy. They devise communications and marketing strategies and projects that allow brands to best structure growth processes. Sixeleven creates projects for brand strategy, communication and marketing that home in on every aspect of a brand’s presence.

Their focus is on developing specific tools, which may include brand restyling, designing the layout of a catalogue, rethinking and developing your website, digital campaigns and promotional videos. Because satisfying their clients’ requests is their top priority, they can suggest and design scenarios that will take you to the next level and at the same time, access an all-new overall outlook.

About the Netty Awards

The Netty Awards are a prestigious awards program that honors top leaders and companies across various industries in the digital age. With over 100 unique categories and a longstanding track record as one of the most trusted organizations in the industry, the Netty Awards celebrate achievements in Design, Social Media, Influencers & Creators, Web, Advertising & PR, and Apps & Software. Recently featured in USA Today for their Top Agencies List, the Netty Awards are recognized as one of the most trusted agency directories for decision-makers.