Markus aka DJ !mauf has been DJing for nearly 20 years. Based in Dresden-Neustadt, he plays Indie and Rock, runs his own event series and is co-creator of two larger projects: the Silent Disco tours and the Dresden am Meer festival. I love going to his events, and I noticed that his website hadn’t kept up with any of it.

The existing site was built on an outdated WordPress theme that hadn’t been touched in years. It was designed for older screen proportions, made poor use of modern display widths, and buried his most important projects in small, easy-to-miss text blocks. The event listings were cluttered and hard to scan. For someone operating at a genuinely professional level, the site didn’t reflect that at all.

He didn’t ask me to redesign it. I just started.

At the time I was transitioning from Adobe XD to Figma and wanted a real project to learn on. But the more I got into it, the more it became about solving an actual problem rather than practising a tool. I analysed what makes !mauf visually recognisable, his colour palette and the aesthetic of his event series, and built on that rather than starting from scratch. Same same, but different. The vinyl shape and the audio wave gradient were ways of creating a visual language that felt native to music without being literal about it.

When I hit the limits of what Figma could do for the interactions I had planned, I moved the relevant screens into After Effects and animated them there. That was a deliberate decision: the animation quality I had in mind needed a different tool, and I’d rather learn the right workflow than compromise on the result.

Once the visual language was established, I extended it further to explore how the identity could scale: event posters, merch and social media posts, all visually consistent with the website concept. The goal was to show that the design wasn’t just a one-off page, but a coherent system that could carry across touchpoints.

I eventually invited Markus over and showed him the concept. He loved it, and given that he’s a designer himself, that meant something. The main reason it wasn’t implemented was time and budget, not the concept itself.