La Nature — a festival experience built on curiosity, not a line-up

La Nature is a festival from the NoName collective in Liège — small on purpose (around 3,500 people), fiercely community-driven, respectful, and built around the music itself rather than the names on a poster. I redesigned and rebuilt their website, as a volunteer on the crew.

The old site was static, text-heavy, and buckled under load every time tickets went on sale. But the real challenge was the brief: La Nature deliberately publishes no public line-up. The site had to sell out a festival on curiosity and trust alone — to make you want in without telling you who's playing.

Designing for discovery, not a poster

So the work was as much product and design as engineering: an experience that invites curiosity and earns trust through the festival's values and craft instead of a headliner list. Every choice had to answer "how do we make someone believe in this without the usual proof?" — leaning on tone, restraint, and a sense of a world worth stepping into.

An on-site timetable, gated to the field

During the festival the site becomes a live timetable — but only for people actually there. The schedule, and the ability to favourite and share sets, is gated to visitors physically on site; off-site, it stays closed. It keeps the experience for the people in the field, in the spirit of the festival. The timetable is powered by littlebooker, which feeds the programme to the site over an API.

Built to survive the on-sale

The ticket-sale spike that used to break the old site is now a non-event: rebuilt on Next.js with Strapi for content the crew manages, hosted across Cloudflare and OVH, and served from the edge/CDN so a few thousand people hitting refresh at the same minute is handled without breaking a sweat.