Dutch Design Week
Streamlining the pre-event planning journey of Dutch Design Week 2023 through a functional microsite.
In this five-week interaction design course project, the goal was to create a microsite for Dutch Design Week, a renowned annual festival attracting visitors globally with over 600 events. The project involved graphic experimentation, leading to the development of interactive features and prototypes. I conducted research on the festival, participated in the graphic design process, and assisted in the design of the site's content.
01
Overview
Role
Content Design, UX Design, Research
Team
Christina Raganit, Michael Dresler, Brianna Mei, Medeline Ho
Figma, After Effects, Photoshop
Tools
Duration
5 Weeks (Spring 2023)
Microsite Design
02
As a pre-event planner, the microsite intends to offer a seamless experience of planning and enjoying the festival.
The landing page gives visitors an overview of all resources the microsite provides, as well as a dropdown menu for visitors who want to directly navigate specific pages. It serves as a learning tool that directs visitors to the itinerary and ticket purchasing resources.
Landing Page
The dropdown navigation feature grants visitors effortless access to specific pages, enhancing their browsing experience.
Navigation
The event page serves as a planning tool, offering comprehensive details and schedules. Visitors can easily integrate events into their personalized itineraries, facilitating efficient schedule organization.
Event Scheduling
Upon adding events, visitors gain effortless access to their personalized itineraries. This feature offers visitors a comprehensive daily schedule overview, facilitating seamless navigation and enhancing their event experience.
Itinerary
The ticket purchasing page employs a streamlined four-step process, simplifying the visitor's reservation journey for the event. Combined with the itinerary tool, it ensures a seamless and efficient pre-event experience.
Ticket Purchase
Content Strategy
03
Dutch Design Week is an annual festival that hosts more than 600 events and has visitors from all over the world. We wanted to surface content that was not already present on their current website and we discovered that their event pages lacked the depth of information necessary to enable visitors to make informed decisions about attending specific exhibitions.
I conducted extensive research to curate content tailored to individual exhibitions, aiming to empower visitors with a comprehensive understanding of how they can optimize their festival experience by strategically planning their schedules.
Art Direction Process
04
To create a distinct identity for the festival, the team delved into graphic experimentation. The process began with a comprehensive exploration of a set of design principles and qualities taken from Ellen Lupton and Massimo Vignelli.
To go beyond the surface, we combined different design principles and qualities to create an extensive amount of posters. These posters then evolved into various pathways for further iteration. (poster 4 is a sample of my contribution)
Studying the Qualities and Principles
3 approaches emerged from our experimentation and the second one was chosen for its distinct identity and versatility across different media.
Diverging to Converging
Graphic assets that I contributed in the creating process.
The halftone treatment adds textural depth to the images, contrasting them with the bold, solid background. Color overlays are added in correspondence to the colour of text boxes to strengthen the identity of each page.
I found, edited and treated the images used for the microsite.
Image Treatment
Typography
Designing Interactions
05
The initial explorations into interactions served as the foundation for our eventual interaction principles. While implementing our visual styling, we explored several interactions, animation and navigation which resulted in our final interactions.
A dynamic card system that reveals and collapses information in synchrony with the user’s scrolling.
Visual intrigue on the home page is achieved with a dynamic title that rotates, changes positions and sizes within a modular structure.
An intuitive and elegant user interaction is established by a change in color when the user hovers over a title
An illusion of depth is established by displaying images both behind and in front of the heading. The horizontal carousel establishes the perception that the images exist in a larger realm, beyond the confines of the frame.
Reflection
06
One of the key takeaways we learned from this project was the value of the principle, 'Don’t Design in Your Head.' We discovered that materializing our thoughts into physical forms greatly enhanced both our communication and ideation processes. This experience reaffirmed the effectiveness of visualizing and hands-on designing in transforming abstract ideas into concrete solutions.
I learned the importance of teamwork and the necessity of tackling even mundane tasks with diligence, recognizing that enthusiasm isn't always a prerequisite for task completion. Additionally, I discovered the critical role of leadership in task delegation and management, essential for achieving project goals within tight deadlines.
If given the opportunity to revisit the project, I would try to gain a deeper understanding of the event, which would inform more effective design choices. Exploring a variety of micro-interactions and page layouts would be a priority to enhance the overall cohesiveness of the microsite. Unfortunately, due to stringent deadlines, our team was limited in our capacity to experiment as extensively as we would have liked.