From years of accumulated layers to a clean, secure base, in line with the festival's new brand for its fortieth edition.
MiX Festival is the international LGBTQ+ cinema and queer culture festival. For forty years it has brought to the stage of the Piccolo Teatro Strehler the films and guests that shaped the history of queer cinema in Italy.
For its fortieth edition the festival unveiled a new visual identity, designed by Studio FM Milano, with a reference prototype. They asked me for two things at once. To take over the site and overhaul it thoroughly, and to bring it in line with the new brand in time for the edition.
The starting point
The first step was a full technical audit. The visible part of the site worked, the base underneath did not.
29 plugins stuck on old versions, with security and compatibility updates never applied.
On top of that were leftovers from old installs, duplicate configurations and a cache that was never enabled. Nothing serious on its own. Together, a slower, more fragile site that was hard to manage. I laid it all out in a report and ranked the work by priority.
My approach
I set up a separate staging environment, an exact copy of the site. There I applied the updates, checked compatibility one by one, cleared the leftovers and fixed the configurations. I redesigned the site on the new visual identity: colors, type and graphic style from the prototype provided.
Prototype
The results
The site is back to being up to date, secure and faster, cleared of the leftovers that weighed it down and finally in line with the new fortieth-anniversary brand. A tidy, maintainable base, ready for this edition and the ones to come.
A supplier runs through a list of tasks and then disappears. A partner takes care of the result.
The method I bring to every project
From supplier to technical partner
What started as a one-off job became something more. While the work was underway the team offered to bring me on as the festival’s technical partner, and I accepted. I stay close to the project, I spot the risks before they become problems and I look after the site as if it were my own. That is the relationship I have with MiX Festival today.
