Hanamicon

Hanamicon is the largest anime, manga, and gaming convention in Styria, held every year since 2017 for three days in May or June. It offers a wide mix of panels, contests and workshops. During my master’s program one project challenged us to completely redesign an existing website. We could choose any site we liked, and I decided on Hanamicon. As a convention fan myself, I’d experienced usability issues with another site from the same organizer, which motivated me to improve things here.

One of the biggest challenges was creating a new structure for all available information. The website has a lot of information to offer, that is divided into many submenus and pages. Due to this it is rather hard to navigate and content also repeated itself. That’s why I started this project of with developing a new sitemap with a new and improved structure. Additionally, I also did some market research, created personas and conducted a SWOT analysis. These insights guided all further design decisions and helped me define the website’s main goals: clarity, accessibility, and visual coherence.

The first creative step was redesigning the Hanamicon logo. A new mascot for the convention has been created in 2023, but lacked presence on the website and in the overall design. Inspired by Y2K aesthetics, fitting both current trends and the nostalgic roots of early 2000s anime, I created a bold, pink-centered design. Using quick sketches and wireframes, I refined the structure and later built high-fidelity mockups in Figma for both desktop and mobile. A dark gray background helped balance the vivid color scheme, while features like carousels, accordions, and breadcrumb navigation improved usability.

This was a large-scale web design project, covering everything from information architecture to logo redesign and an interactive prototype. At first, I felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of content, but mapping and reorganizing every subpage taught me a lot about structuring information effectively.