Budapest Spring Festival A cultural website reimagined
The digital presence of the city’s flagship cultural event, taken online for the first time in 2021 and fully redesigned in 2022 on a layout system inspired by the Fibonacci sequence.
- Budapest Brand
- Budapest Brand / Municipality of Budapest
- 2021-2022
- Lead for UX and UI design
Context
The Budapest Spring Festival is the city’s flagship cultural event. It went fully online for the first time in 2021, because of COVID.
I led UX and UI design for the festival’s digital presence across two years, transforming it into a responsive, scalable online platform.
Challenge
The core challenge was a scalable search and filtering system for an unknown and ever-growing set of criteria: programmes, locations, genres and content cards that also had to work seamlessly on mobile.
The scope outgrew every early briefing, requiring us to redesign on the move, under tight public-sector timelines and regulations.
The 2022 redesign added two ambitions of its own. Its structure was inspired by the Fibonacci sequence, so mathematical proportion had to remain intact across every screen size and content variation. And the official Budapest brand book, made for print, had to become something digitally alive.
My role
I led UX and UI design and delivered the full cycle: research, wireframes, prototypes, UI, and QA and testing. I presented key UX decisions and prototypes to city leadership.
Approach
I created a design system that unified event information, ticketing and real-time updates.
- Filtering logic for dynamic, high-volume cultural content
- A modular UI to support flexible content and visual hierarchy
- Livestream capability integrated into the event platform architecture
- A CMS setup that gave editors autonomy
Collaboration
Three stakeholder groups, with marketing as a close partner on tone of voice and microcopy.
The work was a continuous balance between marketing expectations and user-first UX, with design decisions presented to city leadership along the way.
Design
We envisioned a modern, vibrant and immediately recognisable style while remaining faithful to the source. I enjoyed the liberty to come up with fresh ice-cream colours as variables for the original palette.
Outcome
A festival platform with strong identity, smart structure and smooth discoverability.
- The first-ever online platform for the Budapest Spring Festival, launched in 2021 and implemented in 17 days
- Fully redesigned in 2022 with a refined visual identity and a seamless mobile experience
- Hybrid access supported: ticket sales and livestreams
- Helped generate over HUF 20 million in cultural revenue
- 170+
- 100+
Reflection
Adapting the print-based brand book used for City Hall’s visual communication to a digital environment was a recurring challenge.
We did our best to give every cultural project and landmark event its own visual identity while keeping them all under the umbrella of the city brand. Our task was also to come up with a design that could scale and meet the needs of future events in the years to come.