Analysis of previous freedom festivals
Current Homepage – 2023
The current homepage of the Freedom Festival shows a modern layout with typical features and assets that would be commonly found in present-day websites, such as the logo in the left hand corner, a navigation bar, a main image and links to social media. According to the visual hierarchy “Z shaped reading pattern” it makes sense to keep the logo in the top left corner as that is where the viewers eyes will land first before scanning the page right and reading the “View the gallery” text underneath.
The page utilises a simple palate of colours taken from the general house style to keep it recognizable throughout medias. However considering what the festival stands for and how it’s a celebration of creative and artistic performances, they could take more creative liberty to design a homepage that’s more inventive and original. In its current state without any previous knowledge of the festival it could perhaps be mistaken for a simple event targeted towards a more youthful audience due to the bright, playful colours and limited text even though the actual festival is a big event that brings lots of communities together for numerous days.
I believe the overall user experience of this website to be positive as it communicates key information quickly to potential visitors and has a simple to operate navigation bar to find said information, however it may lack interest for anyone quickly browsing through the page and not look complex enough to hold viewer engagement for a significant amount of time. I also find that it’s quite hard to find out more about what the actual festival stands for and the purpose of the whole event so I believe that should be made clearer to the reader so they are more inclined to want to attend.
As you scroll further down the page the brand trademark image is reinforced with the consistent house style of cheerful colours as well as big, bold text within the same font family.
2021
Looking back at the homepage form 2 years ago you can clearly see it looks slightly less polished with the columns seemingly a bit more jumbled together and less consistency to the layout. The way some of the links are organised onto the main image banner is reminiscent of how a newspaper website would typically appear with all the headlines and smaller stories bundled up into a couple columns of the page. I think this makes it look less organised and more busy than it would need to be.
In the banner on the top of the page there are various buttons including social media links, a link to sign up to their newsletter, a search bar, and a login button which looks overly crowded especially when with designing websites you have a much space and freedom as you like to organise the layout so it should be easier to spread out the assets, as opposed to traditional print mediums. There are also quite a few call to action buttons which may make it seem more laborious to research what the event is about to the viewer.
The type here is also slightly different from the 2023 version as the point size of text on the main image saying “Freedom Festival” is now incredibly smaller and less bold making it stand out much less.
2019
The house style in this past version is still relatively similar except there are a lot more images and much less text. This is an interesting approach to promoting the event as one of the only ways to learn about it instantly is to scan over the array of pictures of the event before having to seek out where the actual text to read is. As this is an older design from 4 years ago the design isn’t as responsive when you zoom in and out of the page and instead fills up the margins on the sides of the website without leaving it with negative space. This makes the little amount of text that is there hard to read as it spans over the entire screen of the desktop and makes wanting to read through it an arduous task.
There is also a video of the festival embedded onto the page, however it doesn’t play automatically, it only starts once playing the video icon in the centre which I think dates the website quite a lot as the look of the button is quite old fashioned and not modern.
2018
2018’s take on the Freedom Festival homepage is significantly more unique with the user experience being completely different from both past and future renditions as instead of using the traditional scroll bar the designers have opted for a parallax approach where the website scrolls through multiple images instead of inching slowly down the page.
2017
This home page has the most basic design out of the recent versions of the freedom festival. It utilises a lot of negative space but at the same time lacks a lot of colour and interest due to the plain white background. They’ve chosen to lay out the information in a grid formation which makes the user experience quite confusing as you have to scroll through multiple images and read each heading to find what you are looking for. The designers have also used the same freedom festival logo as the background for each box which makes it look quite repetitive and boring.
2014
I think the 2014’s design for the homepage looks the most out-dated due to the repeated images in the background which tells us it probably wasn’t designed for modern desktops in mind that have a larger width to the screen. The images and text also look quite jumbled together with clear order of which to read first.
Another notable aspect is the faded/transparent white border around the text that was used to make the material stand out more but just makes it look more childish and clumsy.
References:
- Internet Archive (2014) Internet Archive, Wayback Machine. Available online: https://web.archive.org/web/20231105024718/https://www.freedomfestival.co.uk/ [Accessed 04/11/23]
- Freedom Festival (2023) Freedom Festival Arts Trust. Available online: https://www.freedomfestival.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAuqKqBhDxARIsAFZELmL-l5rrtkpQa11BAdPpMoA1ed9I6JmsdwNmsU51sUFUMr4baxrjWCEaAvREEALw_wcB [Accessed 04/11/23]