Gravitas
Website design | Visual branding
2025
Gravitas is VIT Vellore's techno-management fest, and its website is how thousands of students find their way through 200+ events in three days. I redesigned it from a wall of text into a catalogue you can cut down to the handful of events that apply to you.
Services:
Challenge:
Two hundred events, one wall of text, and the same page for everyone.
Role:
Web designer, with the Gravitas'25 Design and Print team: sign-in, the event catalogue, filters and the profile.
01
About
Nobody was failing to find events, they were failing to get from two hundred of them down to one.
A fest site gets about ten seconds from a student who already half knows what they want. Gravitas had the opposite problem to most sites: nothing was missing, everything was there at once.
Two hundred events is a good problem to have and a terrible page to read. Most of my rebuild is about giving a student permission to ignore nearly all of it.
02
Details
- Event
- Gravitas'25, VIT Vellore
- Live at
- gravitas25-frontend.vercel.app
- Scope
- Website design, event catalogue, authentication, profile
- Catalogue
- 200+ events across three days
- Team
- With the Gravitas'25 Design and Print team
Challenge
The site had scaled into content saturation. A first-year looking for a beginner workshop and a final-year hunting a hackathon got identical pages, in the same order, with no way to narrow them.
And a maybe had nowhere to go. An event you liked but were not ready to pay for could not be saved, so coming back meant starting the search over.
Solution
I asked who you are before asking what you want. Role-based sign-in filters the catalogue the moment you arrive, so the page starts narrow instead of starting with everything.
Then filters for category, price and team size, and a wishlist ahead of the receipts, so a maybe has somewhere to go. A retro-tech system of hard grid, pixel type and high-contrast panels makes the density read as organisation rather than noise.
03
Highlights
One tap removes every irrelevant field
Picking VIT student or external participant first means the form only asks what that person can answer. A student never sees organisation fields, and an external participant is never asked for a registration number.
It also lets the catalogue, pricing and eligible events change without the user filtering for any of it.
Filters that stay open
A catalogue this size is used by narrowing again and again, so the filters live in a persistent rail instead of behind a button. Category, price and team size are the three questions students actually arrive with.
Every card carries time, date, team size and price on its face, because those decide whether an event is even possible for you.
A wishlist before the receipts
Students shortlist events, check them with friends and a timetable, then book. So the wishlist is the first tab in the profile, ahead of purchases: a profile organised around what you meant to do next is a way back in.
04
What I tried
From information board to system
I treated the site as a system that responds to who is using it, not a board that shows everything to everyone.
Everything present, nothing prioritised.
- One generic list for every visitor
- Scroll until you find it
- No way to save an event for later
- Errors and empty states end the visit
- Register now or lose your place
The same catalogue, made workable.
- The experience narrows to your role at sign-in
- Filter by category, price and team size
- Wishlist anything you are not ready to book
- Every state routes back into the fest
05
Results
06
What it taught me
What I learned
Filtering starts before the filters.
The biggest cut to the catalogue did not come from the filter rail. It came from one question at sign-in, answered once, that quietly removed everything a student could never attend.
Intent needs somewhere to wait.
Shortlisting is how these decisions actually get made. Without a wishlist, every maybe was lost the moment the tab closed.
Keep exploring
