Microsite Design for 48h Neukölln 🎪
Largest Independent Art Festival of Berlin 🎨
Another 5 days of a design sprint at Ironhack is to create a website for a festival. This is an individual work and I took the opportunity to re-think my favorite festival: 48 Hours Neukölln. The largest independent art festival in Berlin needed a kick.
“48 hours Neukölln” is an art festival in Berlin’s district with the same name. Within 48 hours about 300 cultural institutions and societies display the diversity of Neukölln’s artistic potential. The city of Berlin shares that:
People from more than 160 nations and with different backgrounds, religions and world views live in the Neukölln district. This diversity can cause tensions but it also makes Neukölln an exciting part of the city to live in.
Research About Festival
Neukölln celebrates all the colors of its local in that 48 hours with its bold standing. The organizers think that it squeezes the most valuable art pieces of town and welcomes everybody since 1999. It is a festival! 🎉
We were lucky that some weeks before I started working on the project, the festival declared the theme of the upcoming year. I have spent quite some time to read between the lines of the curatorial text and created the mood board:
The team has chosen a very bold attitude towards this year’s theme: BOOM! 48 hours Neukölln is an explosion, critical, questioning limits of growth and open to all directions.
I started conducting my research among respected, well-known and inclusive art festivals and demonstrations in Germany. Celebrating Bauhaus100 this year made it easier since we are already in an arty year. 🧑🏻🎨🎨🤹🏻🎭🎪
User Research
The festival is overwhelmingly rich with different forms of artistic production. My interview results show that there are two types of users: locals who visit the festival and the artists who want to contribute.
Visitors want to reach the information as quickly as possible with minimum clicks. People are curious about the art itself, artists, location and the time. They like to prepare their route on a map base.
Producers want to get in contact with organizers in a well-structured way. The bureaucracy of the application process is a hurdle for many of the local talents.
No other form of representation can be better than the art itself. So, the microsite should show it.
Competitor Analysis
I conducted my competitor analysis among Kunstfest Weimar, Pictoplasma Conference, documenta and Die Vielen. I wanted to locate 48h Neukölln among respected and well-known independent festivals.
The UI
Keeping in mind that this is an art festival, I wanted to design minimal and to the point. Knowing that the production will be made by the local artists for the local residence, I wanted the design to be the canvas for the festival. I wanted the website to focus on the art itself, artists and location as the core points. At the same time, I did not want it to be pure plain black and white since the festival is for the people of color.
Accordingly, I worked on my prototypes first low-fi and directly jumped to hi-fi. My responsive design includes a tablet version as well. During the process, I prepared my style-tile and at the end, a zeplin file ready to code for web developers.
The Prototype
Learnings
I spent quite a lot of time on the animation of the theme. It was a choice to learn more about the program principle for mac. Thanks to this project, I am grateful that I discovered my passion for animation and micro-interactions. I can proudly say that I am confident to take more animation challenges in the future.
Translating a curatorial text into visual was quite a challenge. Hopefully, I have fulfilled it at the end. I am happy to receive productive comments about my design for further iterations.
