Type
Website
Role
UX | UI | DEV
Agency
Freelance
Creating an overview of over 90 events in 3 days across 40 locations
The Spirit of Amsterdam is a three-day urban festival celebrating the city’s 750th anniversary by uniting music, art, culture, and rituals across more than 40 houses of worship spread out all over Amsterdam. The festival’s website serves as a digital gateway, reflecting its mission to foster connection and inclusivity.
Boldness for clarity
It design of the website evolution of the visual identity for the Spirit of Amsterdam, which was designed by Jay Sunsmith. Bold and big typography and clashing colors are used to test the duality, tolerance and importance of having a festival like this in a city like Amsterdam, where tolerance of different cultures is one of it’s biggest strengths. The UX and visual design of the website is made to be very simple and hide as much details as possible until the users view a specific event or location page, due to the immense amount of events and locations, and uses a lot of hover/scroll interactions to show imagery, to encourage exploration, which is also a key principle of the festival.
Home
The Homepage of The Spirit of Amsterdam sets the tone with bold typography and smooth transitions, and includes a preview of some of the events, and all of the locations. On desktop imagery is overlayed on top of different sections for events and locations, and on mobile this is done by scrolling over the correpsonding item, in this way the screen estate is kept clean by being able to showcase the immense amount of locations and events, and invites user to find out more if they are interested in a specific item.
Events
Since the events are held in a timespan over 3 days (4 including the opening party), the events page is sorted by date by default. Every event has at least one and often multiple categories, which can be filtered on. The user is able to filter all the events by type, date and location.
Locations
Since there are more than 40 locations, the locations page is one big list. By keeping the design minimal and showing an photo of the house of worship on hover/scroll, the user can easily get an impression of each location quickly, without cluttering the screen with over 40 images.
Stringing events and locations together to invite users to explore
Every event page has an overview of 5 similar events in that category, and a small preview of the location it is held at, including a link to that location page. Every location page contains a list of all the events it is hosting ordered by date. This ensures that users can browse and explore the website to find similar events with ease, without having to go back to the event or location overview page every time. Our analytics data show that users are more inclined to browse through events/locations in this more natural way before they make a decision to buy a ticket for an event, than using the overview pages and filtering by interest.
To Spirit of Amsterdam lives on!
The Spirit of Amsterdam was a huge success, and a new idition will be held next year! Check out the website for archives of the previous edition(s), or visit one of the event for the next edition.