Responses by Matthias Last, founder and creative director, Studio Last.

Background: The European Month of Photography (EMOP), Germany’s largest festival of photographic imagery, celebrates its tenth iteration during March of 2023 in Berlin, and we gave this festival a clear, effective website. Our target audience were international photography and art lovers of all ages.

With the festival’s extensive program featuring different artists, days and locations, it was important for us to create a website that would not only inform but inspire visitors EMOP’s wide range of offerings. We wanted to stand out from other calendars that you find online and focus on the artists and their work. We aimed to create a tangible experience for users and give them a taste of what the festival had to offer.

Larger picture: The website has been a great success, with visitor numbers higher than ever! Of course, this is also because of the greater promotional campaign; beautiful EMOP posters were plastered all over Berlin.

Favorite details: We’re very proud of the website’s intro with its carousel of featured photographs and the rotating cube logo. The idea behind this was to start with the reason why people would access the site in the first place: photography. The gallery of images catapults users directly into the festival’s atmosphere, increasing their intrigue and curiosity.

Throughout the website, we included a lot of small animations for a joyful user experience. Examples of these can be found on the LINKS page to the portfolios and on the HOME screen. We also kept the color palette simple—black and white with pops of neon yellow, the festival’s featured color for this iteration—wanting the focus to always be on the photography. The Swiss structure of the site also organizes the information in clearly defined boxes and spaces. Additional functions such as the day/night mode, language button and font size adjustment further increase the user experience.

Challenges: The EMOP festival had approximately 100 different galleries and exhibition places, and it was important for us to not just list these places, but also feature the artwork. This was challenging as there was so much information to collate. The team from cultural center Kulturprojekte Berlin and our programmer Jimi Alexander Semino at web3000 did an incredible job at embedding the photos: they created a data hub where each gallery could upload their images and information. This made the website upgradeable and changeable, and it saved us a lot of time.

Time constraints: Although our time window was super short, we managed to create everything we wanted. We can proudly say we would not change much. Something like that doesn’t happen often.

Navigation structure: What we love about the navigation is the simplicity. We wanted the navigation to be perfectly tailored to the needs of each user. You can access all the options easily and from different perspectives: finding exhibitions by location, artist or map. You can further narrow down your search with the filter options and specify the exhibitions by district, accessibility, dates and cost. Through these functions, everybody should be able to sort through the huge festival and find an exhibition that suits them best.

Technology: web3000, with whom we worked on this and many other projects, used HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Tailwind CSS, React for the programming and WordPress, and REST for the back end.