VISUAL • INTERACTION DESIGN
Crafting a post-event digital experience for La Bâtie-Festival
Company
Timeline
March - July 2024
Contributions
Visual Design, Graphic Design, Interaction Design
Team
5 Designers (Raymond C, Lori J, Angela L, Christy F)
Overview
Designing a lasting festival experience beyond the event.
Our team explored how La Bâtie, an annual multidisciplinary festival in Geneva, could extend beyond the event, creating a more lasting connection between artists and audiences. We developed a new visual identity expressed across physical graphic assets and a digital microsite, creating a space for audiences to engage with artists beyond their performances.
About the Client
What is La Bâtie-Festival de Genève?
La Bâtie is a multidisciplinary 18-day annual festival featuring live performances, choreography, concerts, DJs and more. It brings together a diverse range of national and international artists across more than 20 venues in and around Geneva, Switzerland.
Mothers - A Song for Wartime, directed by Marta Górnicka.
Performance clips from La Bâtie 2023
The Problem
How can the audience learn more about each artist?
La Bâtie showcases over 40 productions across diverse genres, each reflecting contemporary creativity. With so many inspiring works, our team aimed to highlight each artist’s unique voice and create space for audiences to connect with them beyond the performance.
Polaroids featuring just a few of the many La Bâtie artists
Missed Opportunity
The current website focuses on the pre-festival experience.
For many attendees, especially those discovering new artists, the experience doesn’t continue after the event. Opportunities to deepen engagement, revisit performances, or connect with artists were largely missing.
This revealed two key opportunities:
Extended artist narratives & multimedia features
Artist profiles that go beyond basic bios that offer fans a deeper, more human connections with the performers.
Interactive, shareable experiences
Create moments that invite exploration and sharing, helping audiences stay connected even after the festival ends.
This led to one core question
How might we?
How might we create opportunities to sustain La Bâtie's audience engaged with its artists and deepen the cultural experience year-round?
Solution Highlight
A post-event microsite that fosters deeper connections between fans and artists.
Design Process
A process centered on visual identity and storytelling.
Unlike a typical UX project, this one prioritized defining the tone, content, and artistic direction first, then shaping interactions around it. The process moved from framing the core problem to exploring visual directions and finally refining how the experience comes to life through interaction.
Step 1: Content Design
First, we asked: what stories are actually worth telling?
Fans may already know artists through their music, but what do they never get to see? We curated three content pillars that would take people somewhere new: the biography behind the artist, the process behind the music, and the personal world behind the persona.
Structured the site around the artist as a person, not just a performer.
Step 2: Image Grouping
We had stories. We needed a language to tell them in.
As part of the process, we were assigned Experimental Jetset as a precedent designer. Through an image grouping exercise, we analyzed their work and landed on three key visual qualities that felt right for our project's tone.
We identified three guiding visual qualities
These three qualities became our design constraints, not rules to follow blindly, but lenses to experiment through. We explored how far we could push each one across three distinct art directions.
Experimental Jetset: Image Grouping
Accentuating visual contrast using heavy two tone colour schemes.
Repetition of similar images with slight variation creating a cohesive composition
Overprinting of two colours to create third colour and visual harmony.
Step 3: Art Direction Exploration
We experimented with different directions within a shared system.
We took the three design qualities and deliberately pushed them in different directions, not to find the "correct" one, but to understand the range. They were translated into graphic assets across the city to see if it remained flexible enough to extend into a digital experience.
Art Direction #1
Art Direction #2
Art Direction #3
The Final Art Direction
We didn't choose one direction, we listened to all three.
After feedback, it became clear that the answer wasn't sitting neatly in any single direction; it was scattered across all of them. We gathered the strongest design elements and made adjustments to create the final iteration.
Step 4: Microsite Explorations
From the visual system to the digital experience.
With the visual system defined, we had to figure out how it translated into interaction. We explored three different directions, ranging from structured navigation to more expressive, exploratory experiences.
1. Structured Navigation
A more functional approach, using a calendar-based layout to help users quickly access events and information.
2. Visual Exploration
Artists are surfaced through a grid-based layout, allowing users to browse content visually.
3. Interactive Discovery
A more expressive direction where users navigate by interacting with tiles to explore artists dynamically.
Step 5: Final Microsite Direction
We landed on something that balances structure with the unexpected.
The final microsite balances structure with exploration. A modular grid provides clarity, while layered content and interactions introduce moments of surprise, encouraging users to browse, discover, and connect more personally with each artist.
Final screens of the microsite
Reflection
From composition to system.
This project pushed me to think beyond creating a strong visual identity, and instead consider how that identity behaves across mediums. What began as poster explorations evolved into a modular system that could extend into digital interactions. It shifted my perspective from designing static compositions to designing flexible systems—where structure, not individual visuals, defines consistency.
Designing for meaningful engagement.
One of the challenging parts was deciding what content truly matters. With so many artists and performances, it became less about showing everything and more about shaping how users discover and connect. This process made me realize that impactful design isn’t just about visual expression, but about guiding attention and creating moments of connection. It reinforced the importance of using both content and interaction intentionally to support a more engaging and memorable experience.