The site was plain and embarrassing for six weeks, deliberately

Glass, true black, and fifteen red things cut down to five.

The original plan was smaller than what you are looking at. Run a four-month group in Düsseldorf, prove the format works. The hub is not the result. It is where the ecosystem becomes visible.

Nobody backs a group they cannot see. No company hires a team that exists only as a promise. People and their capabilities have to be visible first, and then an institution can support them and a company can hire them.

That changed what this site has to be, and it made the design embarrassing. For six weeks it was plain. Flat cards on a flat page, right information in the right order, nothing to look at. That was deliberate. Get it right first, make it look good after. July was after.

One lesson carried straight over from the visual work I teach. Consistency beats one-off impact. A striking image nobody can reproduce is worth less than a system that produces good ones every time. Same for an interface, so this was not a new look. It was a set of rules.

Rule one: stop drawing boxes with borders. Put light behind the page and let the surfaces catch it. Cards became glass. The canvas went to true black, because anything lighter turns a red glow into grey haze.

The change I like most is the one nobody will notice. There is far less red. Red used to mark categories, dates, links and buttons, which meant around fifteen red things competing on one screen and none of them reading as important. Red now has five jobs and no more than that.

Cards without a photo get a shape instead of a dark rectangle. It is a piece of our own mark, one figure per category, so an events card and a funding card look different before you read a word.

Same content as June. It reads now the way I have been describing it out loud since the start: creator-led, open to institutions, connected to companies that have real work to do.