Deutsche Woche 28
The event site for Deutsche Woche XXVIII, a national German-language competition week at UNESA under the theme "Sprache als Ausdrucksmittel". One identity connects seven competitions, a timeline and a gallery.
Challenge
Seven competitions, three kinds of entrant, one event that has to read as one thing.
Deutsche Woche XXVIII runs seven separate competitions across three levels of entrant: three for high-school students, three for university students nationally, and one open to the general public. Each has its own rules and eligibility, and some are held online while others are on site.
Left alone that becomes seven small announcements and a registration form, and a prospective entrant’s first job is working out which of the seven is even for them.
So the site has to do two things at once: make an entrant’s own competition findable in seconds, and make the whole week feel like a single event under one theme — "Sprache als Ausdrucksmittel", language as a means of expression.
- Falls shortA poster and a registration formThe usual shape for a student event. It scales to one competition and this week has seven.
- Falls shortAn announcement thread on social mediaAnswers arrive scattered across replies, and the entrant who arrives late reads none of them.
- Falls shortOne page per competitionMakes each competition findable and the week invisible. Nothing then holds the seven together as one event.
"Sprache als Ausdrucksmittel": Bahasa sebagai Sarana untuk Berekspresi
Research & framing
Structure, flows & trade-offs
Find your competition, know the dates, see what it looks like.
Navigation is short and event-shaped: home, competitions, timeline, gallery, FAQ, contact — with registration held separately so it is reachable from anywhere.
The competition section is the centre of the site. Each of the seven is a card carrying its name and, in one line, exactly who it is for: news reading for high-school entrants, news reading for university entrants nationally, language knowledge tests at both levels, fairy-tale storytelling, singing, and poetry musicalisation open to everyone. Eligibility lives on the card rather than somewhere that has to be looked up.
The timeline answers when. The FAQ takes the recurring questions directly — how many competitions there are, whether entrants may cross levels, which are online and which are held in person — so the questions that would otherwise arrive one at a time by message are answered once, in public.
- ChosenEligibility printed on the competition cardThree levels of entrant across seven competitions. Stating who each is for lets an entrant self-select without opening anything.
- ChosenOne timeline for the whole weekFive dated points on a single line, rather than a schedule per competition, so the week reads as one event.
- ChosenA single high-contrast identity throughoutBlack on yellow across hero, competitions, timeline and gallery. It is the constant that makes seven things look like one.
The timeline is five dated points on one line: participant registration, extended registration, the technical meeting, the online rounds, and the offline finale. For an event whose entrants are spread across the country and whose competitions run in two different modes, one horizontal line answers the question that would otherwise arrive as a hundred separate messages.
Solution
A single strong identity doing the work of holding seven things together.
One colour, carried everywhere. Black type on a high-chroma yellow field across hero, competitions, timeline and gallery — the constant that makes seven competitions read as one week.
Eligibility stated on the card. Each competition names its level in its own summary, so an entrant self-selects without opening anything.
Category chips in the hero. The full range is visible before any scrolling, which is what a returning entrant needs and a new one uses to orient.
Photography as evidence. The gallery uses real photographs of participants, decorations and the event backdrop. For a recurring event, showing the previous edition is the strongest argument for entering the next one.
A registration action that never leaves. Held in the navigation as its own permanent affordance rather than living at the bottom of the page.
The teaser video and the photo gallery do the work that copy cannot. A recurring event is asking someone to give up a weekend on the strength of what it was like last time, and photographs of a full hall, a decorated stage and participants mid-competition are the only honest answer to that.
Contact is stated plainly at the end — a phone number, an email address and the campus location — because a student committee is reachable in a way a company is not, and hiding it behind a form would waste that.
Validation & iteration
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Outcome
- Live at eventdwunesa.netlify.appchecked 1 September 2026
- Seven competitions, timeline, gallery, teaser video, FAQ and contactchecked 1 September 2026
- Desktop and phone layouts both shippedboth captured for this case study
The site is still up after the event, which makes it a record as well as an announcement: the competitions, the schedule, the photographs and the answers to the recurring questions are all still readable by whoever runs the next edition.
Reflection & limits
A site for a dated event has a second life nobody designs for. This one now reads as an archive of the twenty-eighth edition, but its calls to action still say register — the page has no notion that the event has happened.
The version worth building for a recurring event carries its own state: open, closed, or over, with the gallery promoted as the argument for entering the next one.