WEBFLOW
Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation
ADMAF 30: Turning 30 years of cultural impact into a digital story
Web Design
Webflow
30 years. Told through the people who lived it.
Three decades creates a lot of history, the challenge was turning that history into a digital experience that felt contemporary, human and easy to explore rather than building an institutional archive.
The campaign brought together several different layers of content. Including 30 ADMAF alumni, the ADMAF leadership members, the internationally recognised cultural figures whom have contributed to its success. This was all captured through comprehensive video, photography, personal biographies and testimonial coverage.
The experience needed to accommodate all of this while maintaining a clear narrative and giving every featured individual enough space to tell their own story.
It also needed an architecture that could be managed efficiently within Webflow without requiring dozens of individually designed pages.
The idea was to put people before milestones
At the heart of ADMAF 30 is a simple idea:
An organisation’s legacy is ultimately visible in the people it has helped move forward.
The experience therefore shifts the anniversary story away from a conventional corporate chronology. It begins with the Foundation’s purpose before moving into leadership voices and then opens into the centrepiece of the campaign: 30 ADMAF alumni representing different generations, disciplines and stages of their creative careers.
Artists sit alongside filmmakers, musicians and designers, established practitioners feature with young and emerging talent. Together they create a portrait of ADMAF’s impact that no timeline could communicate in quite the same way.
Designing the experience
The visual approach was deliberately editorial. We used large-scale imagery and videography, generous spacing, strong typography and restrained interface elements allow the creative work and personalities of the contributors to remain the focus.
Rather than filling the experience with unnecessary interface elements, the design gives photography, film and words room to breathe.
The homepage was structured as a journey. It establishes the anniversary and its central message before introducing leadership voices, moving into the 30 alumni, expanding the story through distinguished voices and ultimately bringing the wider campaign together.
The result sits somewhere between a campaign experience, digital publication and living cultural archive.
Building around 30 individual stories
The 30 ADMAF alumni are the core of the experience, each person needed their own space while still feeling part of a much larger collective story.
Individual alumni experiences bring together portraiture, professional background, biography, personal testimony and video within a consistent visual system.
But the discovery does not end at the bottom of an individual story. The web experience encourages visitors to continue exploring other alumni, turning what could have been 30 isolated profile pages into an interconnected body of stories.
This creates a site designed for exploration rather than a linear read from beginning to end.
CMS architecture designed for storytelling
Behind the visual experience sits a structured Webflow CMS architecture. Instead of manually creating and maintaining large numbers of individual pages, reusable templates and structured content models allow the site to generate consistent experiences while preserving the individuality of each contributor.
Content including names, disciplines, imagery, biographies, quotations and media can be managed centrally and surfaced across multiple parts of the experience.
This architecture was important for two reasons. First, it allowed a content-rich campaign to remain manageable. Second, it separated content from presentation, new stories and updates could be managed without rebuilding the underlying experience.
The CMS therefore became more than a publishing tool. It became part of the design system itself.
Going beyond native Webflow
Webflow provided the foundation, but the experience was not restricted to standard Webflow components. We built custom components, embedded code and tailored front-end behaviours were incorporated where the creative or functional requirements extended beyond the platform’s native capabilities.
This allowed the site to retain the speed and maintainability of a visual CMS while introducing more bespoke digital interactions where they added to the experience. The principle throughout was simple; use Webflow where Webflow works well and extend it where the experience demands more.
The result combines the maintainability of a no-code CMS with the flexibility of custom front-end development.
Designing content and technology together
A project like ADMAF 30 cannot be separated neatly into “design” and “development”. The availbility, volume and structure of the content influenced the CMS, which therefore influenced the page architecture which helped form the navigation.
The media requirements from ADMAF meant bespoke component design and custom development. Planning the content model alongside the UX meant the final system could handle a substantial amount of content without allowing the technology behind it to become visible to the visitor. This is particularly important for cultural experiences, the technology should enable the story rather than become the story.
The result
ADMAF 30 is more than a website marking an anniversary, most importantly, it is a digital record of what 30 years of sustained investment in culture can look like when viewed through the people it has touched.
The final experience brings together strategy, UX, visual design, structured content, CMS architecture, video and custom development within a single Webflow platform.
Most importantly, CrisP Digital was able to ensure that the technology stayed in the background and the people and the campaign remain at the centre.
Let’s build something that works better together.
Whether you need a new website, stronger marketing, better SEO, CRM implementation or practical AI enablement, CrisP Digital can help.