Six different kinds of thing happen at a new music festival, and they all get filed under the same word. A concert and a composers’ masterclass and a symposium and a mixer are not interchangeable, and the composer flying in for the workshop and the couple buying tickets for Saturday night are looking for completely different weekends.
So Strata’s events are typed — concerts, masterclasses, workshops, symposia, mixers, meet-and-greets — and a visitor filters down to their own festival rather than reading everybody else’s. Past years stay addressable in an archive, which matters less to a ticket buyer than it does to a grant officer or a programmer checking who Strata has presented before; for an arts organization the back catalogue is a funding document. Donations run through Zeffy, so a small arts organization isn’t operating a payment stack it has no business operating.
When we rebuilt the site in 2023 the design came out of the festival’s own graphic identity rather than being invented next to it — Strata’s print material is genuinely good, so the website was built to look like it belonged in the same set. The whole thing is accessible and quick, which for a festival site is a courtesy rather than a spec sheet item — a fair share of the people reading it are standing outside a venue on a phone, minutes before a downbeat.
