Responses by Sarah Lincoln, design director, A Color Bright

Background: More than just Berlin’s #1 boutique hideaway, Michelberger is one of the city’s defining creative hotbeds, bringing together musicians, artists and future-minded thinkers from all walks of life. With help from Azar Kazimir, he new website is designed to reflect its unique atmosphere and philosophy—while offering a state-of-the-art discovery and booking experience.

Highlights: An overview of the hotel’s various spaces with a focus on human interaction, life and love; a colorful information architecture that reflects the Michelberger’s holistic approach to hospitality and culture; a slick booking flow unlike any other on the interwebs. It’s also really fast, despite the visual exuberance, ensuring a great on-the-go mobile experience.

Challenges: The booking experience is built upon the Synxis/Navarino engine, a standard within the industry. Instead of using its out-of-the-box products, we aimed for a seamless integration into the Michelberger world, so we went back-and-forth with the team of developers, adapting their API to create a custom solution as we built the site. This was as unusual a process as it was insightful—and we couldn’t be happier with the end result.

Navigational structure: The experience starts with pure white light breaking into its constituent spectral colors—all reflecting a different element of the multiverse that is the Michelberger Hotel. The looping gradient in the site’s main navigation and the calming color transitions reflect this idea.

Technical features: The site is driven by DatoCMS, a relatively new headless content management system out of Italy. We used Gatsby to build a static site with React, fetching the content from DatoCMS via GraphQL. The entire booking experience is built on the SynXis booking engine.