Unchain Festival
A fortress for CEE fintech, built for the web.
- Fintech festival
- Oradea Fortress, Romania
- Brand strategy, visual identity, website UI and UX
Finance, unchained
Unchain brings regulators, bankers, tech companies, startups and investors to Oradea, near the border between Romania and Hungary, for two days on the grounds of a medieval fortress.
The festival needed a brand and a website that could do two jobs at once. Sell a serious, senior event to central banks, banks and fintechs. And make it feel like a festival: friendly, relaxed and a little magical.
The website carries most of the work. It has to explain the event, show the people on stage, sell passes, bring partners in and get delegates from 40+ countries to Oradea.
“Unchain the Davos of CEE fintech!”
Unchain's motto
The red thread
One continuous line runs into the UNCHAIN logo and, as you scroll, builds a fortress. It never breaks. On the website the line draws neon towers around the first fold and banner frames around every heading, so each page reads as part of the same fortress.
unchainfestival.com is the festival's front door. The homepage tells the whole story in one scroll: an aftermovie in a fortress frame, who comes, the topics, the speakers, the passes, the latest reports and the FAQ. A Tickets button and the menu stay pinned to the top on every page.
- Website UI
- Website UX
- Design system
- Responsive layouts
The homepage
The programme is the product. Eight topic tracks open as an accordion on the homepage. The agenda page lays out two days on four stages: Main, Focus, Ecosystem and Roundtables. Speakers sit in cut-corner cards with a flag and their institution, and flip to a short bio on hover.
- Agenda layout
- Topic tracks
- Speaker cards
- Speaker filters
More than 130 speakers, filterable by regulation, banking, payments, insurtech, technology, investment and ecosystem.
From a former Prime Minister of Poland to the payments director of the Czech National Bank.The site shows the room before you book it: 900+ business delegates, 500+ companies, 80% from fintech and financial services, 65% CEOs, founders and upper management. Visa leads the partner wall, followed by banking and gold partners, then sponsors, supporters and country pavilions.
- Stats modules
- Delegate breakdown
- Partner tiers
- Partner cards
Then the practical part. Three passes, each in its own fortress-shaped card. A fortress map of stages, expo and networking areas. And a travel page with a flight board of direct routes to Oradea, shuttle times from Budapest and Oradea airports, and partner hotels.
- Pass cards
- Ticketing flow
- Venue map
- Travel board
Every section has its own phone layout. The menu becomes a full-screen list, the speaker grid becomes a single column of cards, and the passes stack with the Buy now button in reach of a thumb.
- Mobile UI
- Mobile navigation
Behind the website sits the brand. We started from the core: an adventurous culture, clients who are creators of finance, a relaxed and confident voice. Then customer profiles drawn from real regulators, bankers, tech leaders and founders, and two creative directions, “Firul roșu” and “Unchained blocks”. The thread and the blocks became the logo, the fortress and the parts the website is built from.
- Brand strategy
- Brand attributes
- Archetype
- Customer profiles
- Creative directions
- Logo
For two days, Oradea will be our fortress.
From the website copy.The first designs
A fintech event with a brand as unexpected as its venue, and a website that does the selling: the programme, the people, the passes and the way to Oradea, on every screen.
900+ business delegates. 500+ companies. 40+ countries.
The numbers the homepage shows for Unchain, the summer festival for CEE fintech.Fintech Boulevard
