Festember Website
The “Saga of Secrets” marketing site: a noir re-skin built for exactly one year.
Web DesignFestember Website sits in the event-marketing industry: the other half of the same festival as the ticketing app, but built to a completely different brief. Where the app is neutral infrastructure, the website is this year’s poster, re-skinned for the 2025 theme, “Saga of Secrets,” with a noir/silhouette aesthetic built to last one edition, not a decade. Its only job is making 18,000 students from 500 colleges want to show up.
Solo. Marketing website: hero, About, navigation, and the mobile-web treatment.
The thinking
A fest website has one job: make someone want to show up. A generic “events happening” page doesn’t do that. It has to earn attention against everything else competing for a student’s September.
The organizing team needed a site built around one unifying idea, this year’s theme, “Saga of Secrets,” executed consistently by a team of contributors, not a grab-bag of sections each person interpreted differently. Inconsistent execution across a large contributor team is the real risk on a project like this.
I looked at how other large student-run fests build hype on their marketing sites, and pulled reference from the noir and mystery-toned shows and films I kept running into while researching the theme. The throughline in both: restraint, a small number of strong visual moves, a silhouette, a colour, a font, repeated consistently rather than a page trying to say everything at once.
I worked with the team to lock the shared visual language early, the noir/silhouette treatment, so every contributor built from the same reference instead of reconciling styles after the fact. My part was the hero, the About section, and holding the theme together through the navigation as people moved through the site.
- Time on site and scroll depth on the hero
- Click-through from the marketing site into the ticketing app
- Social shares of the hero visual
- Visual consistency across every contributor’s section
The noir hero and About section that resulted are built for one year, not built to last. Next year’s theme gets its own visual language, and that’s a feature of the approach, not a gap in it.
Key decisions
- 01A noir, silhouette-led hero for “Saga of Secrets,” deliberately disposable art direction, since next year’s theme gets its own.
- 02The desktop hero was designed to fold down to a phone-width marketing page without losing the mood.
- 03The site and the app run intentionally different visual languages, one a one-year poster, the other a decade of infrastructure. Stating that on purpose beats pretending they match.
The full-size noir hero and the About section: the silhouette treatment given the real estate it was built for.
The same theme folded down to a phone, where most students actually open a fest site from.
“One theme, one year, one noir silhouette: the website that had to feel like a secret worth showing up for.”
Deciding which layer is allowed to be trendy (the site) and which has to stay quiet for ten years (the app) was the actual design decision here. The noir treatment is the fun part; the discipline was not letting it leak into the app.
