Activitats.cat, a 2019 platform rewritten from scratch and a single search box
activitats.cat · 1,276 listings migrated · one search box Activitats.cat is the directory where anyone programming a village festival, a community club or a council event goes to find whoever will make it happen: musicians, companies, workshops, circus, dance, and also the sound, the lighting, the stage, the catering and the crew. It has been online since 2019 and held eight years of listings inside it.
What had run out of road was the platform. An Angular application that split the catalogue across two separate search engines — artistic acts on one side, service companies on the other — and that barely showed anything without a click. The brief was to overhaul it properly: redesign it, change how it works and rewrite it from top to bottom, without losing a single listing along the way.
One search box where there were two. The old platform made you know in advance whether what you needed was an artist or a company, and pick a search engine before searching. Now there is one field and one directory: whoever is putting on an event types “tallers” or “so” and gets what there is, wherever it comes from.
We rewrote the whole platform. The old one was an Angular SPA served by Express; the new one is a Next.js application with App Router and server components, its own API, an admin panel, user registration and a profile area. It is not a change of skin: there is a different platform underneath.
We took the 1,276 listings with us, history included. Migrating was half the job. Eight years of entries, from the oldest record in 2018 to today, with the categories reordered into a new tree and readable addresses instead of the numbered ones from before.
A catalogue’s digital identity, not an app’s. Newsreader for the proper names and Archivo for everything functional, a crimson kept for searching and for asking for a quote, midnight blue in the header and the footer, and two-pixel radii: the cards look like cards in a catalogue, which is exactly what they are. Design, website and development from scratch.
The hard part was not the design: it was deciding that an artist and a sound company are the same thing. They share a card, a listing, tabs and a quote button, because whoever is organising an event needs both and does not think in categories. From that decision on, the old platform could no longer be patched: it had to be written again.
The application runs on Next.js with App Router and server components, behind nginx, with its own API and three areas you cannot see from outside: the admin panel, the registration flow and each professional’s profile area. The typefaces are served from the application itself and the images go through the Next optimiser, served from a Cloudflare bucket. Nothing that paints the page depends on a third party.
The visual system fits in one variable. Literally: the stylesheet declares a single radius, of 2 px, and there is no other. The rest is typographic discipline: Newsreader at 56/56 with -1.4 px of letter-spacing in the main headline, 40/50 at -1 for the section headings and 24/32 at -0.6 for the category names, and Archivo at 16/24 for everything else. The crimson #C7104A turns up seventy-three times and always means the same thing: search, register or ask for a quote.
The editorial side is work too. Every themed photo carries its alt text written by hand in Catalan and its photographer credit over the image, with a whole credits page behind it; listings with no photo of their own are marked “imatge il·lustrativa” instead of glossing over it; and the cookie notice lets you refuse by category. They are small decisions and, in a directory of a thousand-odd listings, they are where you can tell whether anyone has looked after it.
"Troba artistes, activitats i serveis."activitats.cat
Want a result like this for your project?
quivoto, the voting compass that starts with your municipality
Municipal elections are not about party labels: they are about what happens on your street.
View case study →
eclipsi.info, the tool that calculates what you’ll see from your exact location
The map tells you where. This tool tells you what you'll see.
View case study →
Modèlic, a sourdough bakery with its own voice on social
Real bread. And a feed that smells just as good.
View case study →