Helsinki Design Week is the biggest design and architecture festival in the Nordics. Their website had become outdated and didn’t fit the organisation’s needs anymore. Helsinki Design Week and Taiste did a complete overhaul to the website and I was in charge of the user experience and structure.
First we mapped the requirements and needs for the new site and clarified the problems with the old site. The new structure was built together in several co-creation workshops. It’s important that the whole team has a shared vision of what the end product should be like. Wireframe layouts were built before any visual or more detailed UI work.
The site acts as a festival site and also as an year-round design media site. With the re-design it was important to highlight the articles, podcasts and other media content as well as possible. A lot of focus was also put into making the content easy to read and visually appealing on different devices.
The visual identity of the organisation was updated at the same time with the site project. I worked together with Design Week’s graphic designer to bring the right kind of visual tone to the site. The overall identity is minimalistic and neutral to highlight photos and illustrations.
The identity was designed to be flexible so that the festival for instance can play around with its annual identity.
The site was built on Wordpress and the technical implementation of the site was done by Into-Digital. As always, digital service projects are team efforts and the site was built as a team effort between Helsinki Design Week, Taiste and Into-Digital.