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Buuvei / Mongolian Culture Days®
A season platform, not a page: event pages, agendas, artist profiles, and ticketing across three countries. Identity, copy, and Framer build, solo.
Role
Brand & Build
Industry
Culture · Events
status
Live
Year
2026
Challenge
A season of Mongolian events staged for European audiences: exhibitions, throat singing and morin khuur performances, ger-building workshops, food, language sessions. Buuvei is the flagship; Naadam '27, workshops in Paris, and a welcome series sit under it.
Two problems, and the second one is the interesting one.
Structural: this is a growing programme across three countries with events at different stages — one confirmed and ticketed, one dated, four unannounced. A single page collapses that into a list. It needed to work as a hub with real event pages beneath it, and to still make sense when half the programme doesn't exist yet.
The harder one: introducing an unfamiliar culture to people with no prior reference. A French or Swiss visitor has no mental model for a morin khuur or a ger-building workshop. Explaining Mongolia first means they've stopped reading before they reach the booking.
Process
Let the two places share one frame. The hero puts the Eiffel Tower and the Mongolian horseman statue in the same gradient panel, drawn in the same line weight. It's the premise of the whole season in one image, and it does the work that a paragraph of positioning copy would have done badly.
Organise the experience by sense, not by subject. On the Buuvei page the programme runs Listen, See, Touch & Try, Taste, Feel, Share & Learn. A visitor understands what they'll experience before they understand what they're booking — which is the correct order for an audience with no reference point. The name carries the same idea: buuvei means lullaby, framed as listening and encounter rather than cultural showcase.
Make event status legible at a glance. Every card carries a state — UPCOMING NEXT, a date, Coming soon… — and a type: PAID EVENT or FREE TO ATTEND. Six events at four different stages of readiness sit in one grid without any of them looking broken. It's the detail that lets the platform launch before the programme is finished.
Weight as emphasis in running text. The positioning paragraph sets key words in solid black and connective words in grey, so the sentence can be read at two speeds — skimmed for Mongolia, people, traditions, stories, events, encounters, or read whole. One typographic device carrying both audiences.
Segment the contact form. Speaker, Sponsor, Workshop, General. The platform serves attendees, partners, and venues, and routing them at the point of contact costs one field.
An honest ticketing state. "Ticketing details are being finalised — indicative early-bird pricing below." Three tiers with struck-through full prices — Day €25/€35, Two-Day €40/€60, Family €60/€90. Saying pricing is indicative rather than faking a checkout is the right call for a season that's still forming.
Outcome
Live, with Buuvei set for August 2026 and Naadam for July 2027. The testimonials on it come from the organiser's previous European events — a Swiss cultural programmer on the morin khuur performance, a visitor to the Genghis Khan exhibition, a primary school teacher in Nantes whose students built a yurt.
What I Learned
Sensory framing beat explanatory framing. My first structure explained Mongolia — history, geography, context — and it read like homework. Reorganising around Listen, See, Taste, Feel let someone with no reference point know what they'd experience without needing to be taught anything first.
Designing for a programme that doesn't exist yet is its own problem. Four of six events had no date and no detail, and the card states are what let the site launch anyway. If I'd designed only for confirmed events, the platform would have needed rebuilding every time one was added.
One image did more than the copy. The Eiffel Tower and the horseman in the same frame settles the premise instantly; every sentence I wrote trying to do that was worse.
Back
Buuvei / Mongolian Culture Days®
A season platform, not a page: event pages, agendas, artist profiles, and ticketing across three countries. Identity, copy, and Framer build, solo.
Role
Brand & Build
Industry
Culture · Events
status
Live
Year
2026
Challenge
A season of Mongolian events staged for European audiences: exhibitions, throat singing and morin khuur performances, ger-building workshops, food, language sessions. Buuvei is the flagship; Naadam '27, workshops in Paris, and a welcome series sit under it.
Two problems, and the second one is the interesting one.
Structural: this is a growing programme across three countries with events at different stages — one confirmed and ticketed, one dated, four unannounced. A single page collapses that into a list. It needed to work as a hub with real event pages beneath it, and to still make sense when half the programme doesn't exist yet.
The harder one: introducing an unfamiliar culture to people with no prior reference. A French or Swiss visitor has no mental model for a morin khuur or a ger-building workshop. Explaining Mongolia first means they've stopped reading before they reach the booking.
Process
Let the two places share one frame. The hero puts the Eiffel Tower and the Mongolian horseman statue in the same gradient panel, drawn in the same line weight. It's the premise of the whole season in one image, and it does the work that a paragraph of positioning copy would have done badly.
Organise the experience by sense, not by subject. On the Buuvei page the programme runs Listen, See, Touch & Try, Taste, Feel, Share & Learn. A visitor understands what they'll experience before they understand what they're booking — which is the correct order for an audience with no reference point. The name carries the same idea: buuvei means lullaby, framed as listening and encounter rather than cultural showcase.
Make event status legible at a glance. Every card carries a state — UPCOMING NEXT, a date, Coming soon… — and a type: PAID EVENT or FREE TO ATTEND. Six events at four different stages of readiness sit in one grid without any of them looking broken. It's the detail that lets the platform launch before the programme is finished.
Weight as emphasis in running text. The positioning paragraph sets key words in solid black and connective words in grey, so the sentence can be read at two speeds — skimmed for Mongolia, people, traditions, stories, events, encounters, or read whole. One typographic device carrying both audiences.
Segment the contact form. Speaker, Sponsor, Workshop, General. The platform serves attendees, partners, and venues, and routing them at the point of contact costs one field.
An honest ticketing state. "Ticketing details are being finalised — indicative early-bird pricing below." Three tiers with struck-through full prices — Day €25/€35, Two-Day €40/€60, Family €60/€90. Saying pricing is indicative rather than faking a checkout is the right call for a season that's still forming.
Outcome
Live, with Buuvei set for August 2026 and Naadam for July 2027. The testimonials on it come from the organiser's previous European events — a Swiss cultural programmer on the morin khuur performance, a visitor to the Genghis Khan exhibition, a primary school teacher in Nantes whose students built a yurt.
What I Learned
Sensory framing beat explanatory framing. My first structure explained Mongolia — history, geography, context — and it read like homework. Reorganising around Listen, See, Taste, Feel let someone with no reference point know what they'd experience without needing to be taught anything first.
Designing for a programme that doesn't exist yet is its own problem. Four of six events had no date and no detail, and the card states are what let the site launch anyway. If I'd designed only for confirmed events, the platform would have needed rebuilding every time one was added.
One image did more than the copy. The Eiffel Tower and the horseman in the same frame settles the premise instantly; every sentence I wrote trying to do that was worse.