Web Design & Motion · 2026
Sternag 2027
A night-sky, pixel-art festival site built to prove an animated one-pager could replace a heavy page-builder stack.
What this project is
Sternag 2027 is a concept site for a made-up student night festival — a full animated, game-like one-pager built to answer a real question a prospective client raised: could a small studio deliver a highly customisable, animated festival site without reaching for a heavy page-builder stack?
The challenge
Festival sites like this are usually built on a page builder with a tower of plugins stacked on top — one for the countdown, one for the tabs, one for the accordion, each adding weight and fighting the others for control of the page. The brief also ruled out the obvious shortcut: no spring theme, no generic pastel florals. It needed its own identity, built by hand, fast enough that 'yes, we can build that' didn't cost a week to prove.
Creative direction
The answer was a night sky instead of a garden — deep indigo, hand-coded pixel planets, and a title that bounces in like a loading screen. Ticket pricing became ticket phases: Cadet, Pilot, Commander, Supernova, framed like game levels instead of a plain price table, so the same early-bird mechanic every festival uses feels like part of the world instead of a form bolted on top.
How it came together
A system built for one hard rule: not spring
Deep indigo night, three accent colours that read instantly against it, and sharp stepped-pixel corners on every panel, button and card in place of a single rounded edge. Three typefaces each do exactly one job — a chunky pixel display face for titles, a tiny monospace for labels and buttons, a readable sans for everything else.
Pixel art, drawn by code, not imported
Every planet orbiting the hero is drawn pixel-by-pixel on a canvas the moment the page loads — shaded by light angle, banded, cratered, ringed — from a seeded random function, not a sprite sheet. Generate once, cache as a data URL, reuse everywhere it orbits — seven planets, zero image requests.
Ticket phases, done like game levels
Four tiers status themselves honestly — sold out, on sale, next, gate-only — instead of hiding behind one plain 'buy now' button. A stage-tab lineup swaps its whole timetable on click, the headliner set highlighted in the same pink the countdown uses, so the busiest part of the page still reads at a glance.
A venue map that's also pixel art
Ten numbered pins sit on a hand-drawn pixel map of the grounds, synced to a legend list beside it — click either one and the other highlights, with a detail card explaining what's actually there. Built the same way as the planets: drawn on canvas, not dropped in as an image.
One HTML file, no plugins, no page builder — animated, game-like, and still fast.
