Redesigning ohny.org to Serve a Citywide Festival and a Year-Round Audience

The challenge

Monstarlab designed and built the new ohny.org for Open House New York, which runs OHNY Weekend, a three-day festival that opens more than 300 sites across the five boroughs and draws 50,000+ people from 89 percent of the city's zip codes. Year-round, ohny.org is also an editorial publication about architecture, design and infrastructure.

The legacy WordPress site wasn't built to do both. Festival data lived in Airtable and had to be re-entered into the website during the busiest weeks of the year. Editors depended on developers to build new pages. And the site had no clear way to shift between off-season programming and festival mode.

Our approach

We started with research: interviews and surveys with festival-goers, members and OHNY staff, a performance and content audit, and co-design workshops with the team. Several clear problems came out of that work. The site looked the same in every season, so visitors couldn't tell whether the festival was recruiting partners, announcing its lineup, or live. There was no way to browse by neighborhood. And saved itineraries, which visitors spend hours building, would sometimes disappear. The clearest signal from OHNY's staff was that they wanted autonomy more than polish.

That pointed us to a visual CMS the team could run themselves, fed directly by the Airtable base they already trusted. We kept OHNY's existing identity rather than rebranding, and put the design effort into a component system flexible enough to carry its personality across two very different modes.

What we built

• A design system of nearly 60 custom components and 35+ page templates editors assemble without code
• A direct Airtable integration that publishes festival listings automatically as the team updates them
• Festival tools: an interactive map, filters by category, date, location and accessibility, and a saved personal itinerary
• Seasonal site states admins switch themselves, from regular programming to pre-festival to festival
• A mobile-first build to WCAG 2.0 AA standards, with 196 articles migrated from WordPress
• CMS training, video tutorials, documentation and dedicated support through the festival period

What the tradeoffs were

Connecting the site directly to Airtable means the site is only as accurate as the base behind it. Data quality became the festival team's responsibility, which they chose deliberately. Giving editors full page-building control also means not every page will match the original design intent. OHNY judged the speed worth it, and so did we.