Sharjah International Book Fair

The Sharjah International Book Fair is one of the largest publishing events in the Arab world, run under the Sharjah Book Authority. This project covered the homepage for the 32nd edition, held 6 to 16 November 2013.

An event website of this kind has an unusual lifecycle. For most of the year it is a planning and registration tool: exhibitors book stands, publishing professionals apply to programmes, and the public checks dates. Then for eleven days it becomes a live publication, carrying daily news, photography, video, award announcements, and schedule changes as they happen. The same homepage has to do both jobs without being redesigned in between.

The core difficulty is that a single homepage has to serve a public audience and a trade audience simultaneously, and those two groups want almost nothing in common. A page tuned for families planning a visit buries the Professional Program; a page tuned for the publishing industry reads as closed to the public.

Layered onto that:

The page resolves the public-versus-trade tension by fanning the site out into a row of programme doors placed immediately below the hero. Six icon-led entries covering About Sharjah, Books, the Professional Program, the Translation Grant, SIBF Guests, and Services sit as a single teal band across the page. Rather than ranking the audiences, the design gives each constituency a labelled door at the same level, so a rights buyer and a first-time visitor both find their route in the same glance and neither has to read past the other's content.

The dual lifecycle is handled by building live-publication components into the standing layout rather than adding them at event time. An announcements ticker runs directly under the door bar for daily updates. A large Featured News panel uses vertical numbered tabs to switch between News, Events, Photos, and Videos, so four content streams occupy one block of page space and stay useful whether they hold three items or three hundred. A live Twitter feed sits alongside. Before the fair these components carry programme information; during the fair they carry the fair itself, with no structural change.

Designing for an event means designing for two different websites wearing the same skin. The version that exists for eleven days and the version that exists for the other 354 have almost nothing in common in terms of content volume, and the temptation is to optimise for the exciting one. Building components that hold either state was the decision that made the page survivable, and it is the thing I would carry to any brief with a seasonal peak.

Refusing to rank your audiences can itself be the design. The instinct on a page serving both the public and an industry is to pick a primary and route the rest, because that is what produces a clean hierarchy. Here the door bar works precisely because it declines to choose, and it turned out that six equal doors are faster to scan than a hierarchy plus a menu. Equality was not a compromise position; it was the more usable one.