Designing a mobile app for one of Toronto's most iconic music festivals. Artist discovery, ticketing, schedule, restaurants, and an integrated music player — built from scratch and tuned for festival-goers who don't want to miss a set.
NXNE is one of Toronto's most established music festivals. Each year it brings thousands of music enthusiasts together for concerts, art installations, and interactive experiences across more than twenty venues.
Despite the festival's reputation, NXNE didn't have a dedicated mobile app. Attendees were stitching together a festival from the website, social media, and word of mouth. The opportunity was to build something that brought all of it into one place: discover artists, book tickets, plan your night, and find food nearby — without ever leaving the app.
The NXNE app's primary goal was to promote artist discovery and generate excitement for the 2024 festival. Everything else served that.
The project ran over seven weeks, broken into five tightly scoped phases. Each phase had its own deliverables and gate, so the work moved cleanly from research into design and didn't loop back unnecessarily.
We started with interviews and surveys aimed at music enthusiasts who attend festivals regularly, mixed with a smaller pool of people who'd considered NXNE but never went. The split mattered. Returning festival-goers had different needs from people deciding whether to attend at all.
Three findings shaped the entire app:
Out of research, we landed on a single framing question that guided every design decision afterward:
How might we create a mobile app that lets users browse events and artists, book tickets seamlessly, and discover nearby places to enjoy?
NXNE's identity is bold, urban, and unapologetically loud. The app needed to feel like a continuation of that — not a watered-down web version. We anchored on a palette of black, magenta, and sharp white, with the festival's signature arrow mark used as a motif throughout.
For typography, we pulled in two fonts already used in NXNE's broader brand:
Ringside for body. Modern, versatile, and readable across screen sizes. Carries the contemporary feel of the festival without trying too hard.
Gotham for branding moments and headings. Bold, geometric, confident — a font that holds its own next to the NXNE logo.
Black grounds the experience. Magenta is the energy. White is the breathing room. Used in that order of frequency, it gives the app a clear focal hierarchy and lets imagery and artist photos pop.
Each feature in the app was designed to solve one specific moment in a festival-goer's experience: discovering artists before the festival, planning during it, attending the night-of, and exploring around the venues.
A browsing experience built around genre filtering, featured artists, and venue selection. Users can build a wishlist of artists they want to see, which feeds into their personal schedule.
A day-by-day calendar pulling in artists from the user's wishlist. Conflicts surface clearly so users can decide which set to prioritise. "Notify Me" sends reminders before each show starts.
Single-entry and multi-day festival passes in one place. Apple Pay, credit card, and PayPal supported. Tickets stored as scannable QR codes inside the app, ready at the venue door.
Curated lists of restaurants, cafes, and arcades close to each venue. Filterable by cuisine, with menus, locations, and busy-hour graphs to help users plan around set times.
Built-in previews of artists' tracks so users can sample before committing to a set. Becomes a tool for discovery, not just a database of names on a poster.
A simple favourites system that ties everything together: artists, venues, restaurants, all in one bookmarked list, accessible from any screen.
The final NXNE app brought five separate festival workflows into one place: discovery, scheduling, ticketing, food, and music sampling. The visual system felt like an extension of the festival's identity rather than a generic ticket app, and the structure left room for new venues, artists, and partners to be added year over year without breaking the experience.
For me, this was the project where the work got bigger. Mylo was a feature add. McDonald's was a focused study. NXNE was a full app from a blank canvas, and learning to manage that scope without over-designing was the real lesson.
Three things I took into every project after this:
Information architecture is the design. Once we got the IA right (browse, schedule, tickets, places, profile), every screen got easier. When the IA was wrong, no amount of polish saved it.
Brand systems are a force multiplier. Defining the colour, type, and component logic early meant we could ship features fast without re-debating visuals each time.
Festival users plan with their feet. Static schedules don't survive contact with reality. The schedule, wishlist, and notify-me features had to assume people would change their minds halfway through the night.