A Timeline: 16 Seasons of Brighton Festival’s Website
As Brighton Festival reaches it’s 60th anniversary, we’re celebrating our 16th season as their digital partner.
The festival landscape
At Grandad, we have supported festivals for well over 30 total seasons. This sets the foundation for us to not only deliver reliable, scalable and beautiful festival websites, but to innovate solutions that help festivals reach their full potential. We combine this foundation with decades of experience in the arts to meet the needs of a shifting festival landscape. Our festival websites are designed to adapt from pre-season anticipation, through the season and to post-festival connections. Discover our festival solutions here.
This approach has led us to create lasting partnerships, supporting festivals season after season, and our work with Brighton Festival is a testament to this.
2011
Brighton Festival has been a cultural cornerstone since 1967, growing into the South East's largest curated festival. Every year, it brings together tens of thousands of attendees and hundreds of freelance artists for a celebration of creativity. Our longstanding partnership with the Festival began in 2011, and since then, we've evolved their website annually to reflect each year's Guest Director's vision, ensuring a fresh, engaging experience for every visitor who comes through the digital door.
2012
Every great partnership finds its rhythm early. In just our second season together, we undertook our first design refresh, adapting the site to reflect the artistic vision of Guest Director Vanessa Redgrave. It established a working pattern that would define the years ahead: listening closely to the creative direction and translating it into a digital experience.
2013
That year's printed brochure drew heavily on Bauhaus-inspired imagery, and we carried that visual language through to the website. A clean, bold aesthetic that felt true to the festival's ambitions, and an early demonstration of how closely we align the digital and physical experience.
2014
2014 was a year of meaningful technical progress. We seamlessly integrated with Brighton Dome's existing e-commerce solution whilst introducing social media tools to spread the word about events. Crucially, we gave users more ways to find and buy what they were looking for: an interactive calendar, event-type filters, and quick-access discovery tools. Brighton Festival's Marketing Officer confirmed a 20% uplift in traffic, with the majority of tickets now purchased online, significantly reducing the Festival's internal running costs.
2015
Inspired by Guest Director Ali Smith's evocative theme of flight, the 2015 brochure took its cues from her words: "Imagine the world seen from the eye of a bird." Swifts migrating to the UK in May became the visual anchor, a beautiful, kinetic image that we brought to life digitally. 2015 also came with new functionality, The Brighton Dome & Festival team could group events into a ‘series’. While a festival-goer explored an event, other events from the series were recommended, boosting cross-sales.
2016
The Festival's 50th year called for something special. With home and place as the central theme, we created a dedicated web presence for Brighton Festival that stood apart whilst staying deeply connected to our wider work with Brighton Dome. Reusing considered thinking and proven functionality from that project kept budgets sensible and internal integration smooth. The payoff was significant: the Brighton Festival website drove sales up by over 40% in 2016, with many events selling out within minutes - proof that the technology we deployed was both robust and ready for the moment.
2017
For 2017, the artwork was created by a local tattoo artist, and we gave it the digital platform it deserved: seamless, accessible, stylish.
2018
As audience interests evolved, so did our approach to information architecture. In 2018, we made deliberate design and structural changes to bring Guest Director David Shrigley into the spotlight. It was a reminder that the website isn't just a ticketing tool; it's an extension of the artistic identity itself.
2019
The 'Mali in Bloom' theme gave us one of the most striking visual starting points in the partnership's history: Simon's bold silhouette illustration, a celebration of growth, movement and the communal spirit that Brighton Festival represents. The website that year felt alive with it.
2020
Like so much of the arts world, 2020 brought an unexpected halt to live events. Guest Director Lemn Sissay MBE had set out a theme full of the energy and abundance a live festival promises. But when the world moved into lockdown, the festival moved online. Both the events and the website were adapted for livestreaming. It wasn't the year anyone had planned for, but it was a year that tested the flexibility of everything we'd built together.
2021
After a year without in-person events, 2021 felt significant. Under the theme of care, we collectively decided it was time to reinvest, delivering a full creative relaunch ahead of the anticipated reopening. Working collaboratively with the Brighton Festival team, we made considered design decisions around navigation, event discovery and ticket purchasing, while also building in the infrastructure to handle both physical and digital events side by side: a new reality for a post-COVID world.
Even with audience numbers still affected by the pandemic, the results exceeded expectations:
- Bounce rate dropped by 57%
- Session duration increased by 66%.
Brighton Dome and Brighton festival deal with 650 events. Grandad’s new ticket filtering system has meant users can speed through their journey and easily find the right experience for them.Marilena Reina Brighton Festival
2022
Armed with a bold new brand identity created by the powerhouse team at Johnson Banks, 2022 was about doing their vision justice at scale. We developed an intelligently refined search and filter system capable of handling an extensive arts programme and a high-volume ticket-booking operation, making it easier than ever for audiences to find exactly what they were looking for within a rich, complex programme.
2023
The 'Gather round' theme, anchored by a vibrant carpet design evoking a cultural melting pot, set a warm, inclusive tone. Behind the scenes, we introduced priority booking functionality: the ability to lock events to members at launch, before opening them to the public, across multiple membership tiers. It's now a core part of how Brighton Festival structures its on-sale strategy, and the website actively encourages audiences to become members.
2024
With bubbles, stars, rabbits and magicians, the 2024 Guest Director's world was joyful and wonderfully unexpected, and we matched that energy in the design. Plus, this was the year we introduced a new intelligent filtering system to boost event discovery, helping audiences navigate an ever-growing programme with ease.
2025
The theme, 'A New Dawn,' brought sunrise palettes and optimism to the 2025 site. This year also introduced a practical but meaningful improvement: real-time event availability pulled directly into the event catalogue, allowing visitors to instantly see which events were sold out or running low on tickets. Less frustration, faster decisions, more sales.
2026
For the Festival's 60th anniversary, the artwork takes the form of a Brighton pinball machine - packed with beloved local landmarks. Our work this year introduced an editorial information architecture that mirrors the brochure's structure, with dedicated landing pages that map directly to its sections. We also launched wishlist functionality, letting audiences plan their festival season, save the events they're considering, and come back ready to book.
Looking forward
Sixteen seasons. Sixty years of Festival. And we're just getting started.
This partnership doesn't end here; we're already working on innovations and upgrades for what comes next. We cannot wait to see where the next 16 seasons take us.
