AALY
AALY is a quick prototype for a festival platform — a digital artist alley, community and information hub for exhibitors and visitors alike. The prototype runs the whole logged-in flow for Comic Invasion Berlin 2027.
I have been on the festival team since 2012, and I was curious what an independent platform of its own could do for it.
Built with
- Pure HTML and CSS
- no framework, no build step, no npm
- KERN UX v2.6.4
- Public Sans
- Lucide icons
- one shared stylesheet of ~700 lines
- GitHub Pages
How it works
Eight screens, all linked and clickable. The alley is organised around the table. Your own stand, your neighbours on tables 5 to 9 — and a search that takes a table number as readily as a name.
A three-step application — personal data, portfolio, what you want to exhibit — ends in a summary and a reference number. The programme takes bookmarks, and an artist page holds gallery, bio and events.
There is no backend. The prototype exists to put the whole product experience in front of stakeholders and test users before anything is implemented.
In numbers
2026
Process
- Festival desk
- KERN as the base
- Own tokens
- Eight screens
- Clickable
Mobile-first: below 700 px the navigation becomes a horizontal scroll and the grids collapse to one column.
The design-system page is linked from the header of every screen, so the tokens are never a separate document.
Hardest call
The base is KERN UX, the open-source design system of the German public sector. A comic festival is not an authority — starting from scratch would have been the obvious move.
But KERN carries accessibility and form patterns a festival would otherwise have to invent. The festival look sits on top as a token layer: CIB yellow, the mascot, the editorial hero. A theme over KERN, not a fork of it.
What's next
Prototype v0.1, no backend Next: a table plan for the alley and an editable artist profile Further development depends on funding approval
What can Iget out ofyour way?
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