Page 140 - AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 2016

140with speeds as fast as 100 megabytes per second for downloading information) or the user’s deal and type of mobile phone.It is as simple as realising that connectivity varies throughout the day as we might spend hours working in one place, travel on public transport, then go home. We are therefore witnessing an increase in the use of apps but also in website browsing on mobile devices. Many of the festivals we spoke to have detected through their analytical tools this increased accessto their website from mobiles, such as San Sebastián International Film Festival, to cite one of the most important.One of the trends and requisites for any website is switching to a responsive type: a website that can respond and adapt rapidly to any screen size and format, meaning that buttons and menus are enlarged on small screens instead of decreasing in size in accordance with the scale (otherwise they are almost illegible).Website design must be approached di erently compared to ten years ago, as these new circumstances call for a site that can be viewed clearly on screens of all sizes. Websites must be organised and designed to facilitate fast browsing (not only in terms of speed, but also reading) of the most essential information designed from the point of view of user experience (this also explains the rise in User Experience/UX studies).To sum up, websites need to be designed from the user’s point of view and this design must be subordinate to their content unless it is a part of it – as is the case with a few new media festivals – or there is a wish to focus strongly on the cultural disruptions of new media and virtuality, as with the website of Today’s Art,85 a festival devoted to visual art, performances and music.One of the most common styles in recent years is Flat Design (based on at, highly legible gures in colours that are not overly striking but areappealing and look good on many types of screens). However, we also nd sites that continue to respect adaptivity to screens and have a good architecture and well-distributed information but display di erent styles, even re ecting underground Internet culture (such as the trends we see in Tumblr communities), for example the websites of MIRA Festival86 or transmediale.87What is more, since 2015, Google, theleading search and indexing engine, has been penalising websites that are not responsive.88 By penalise we mean that Google decided to stop giving a high ranking (among the first hits in a related search) to websites that were not mobile friendly.For example, if a literary festival wished to appear among the search results for something2. NT BEFORE AND DURING THE FESTIVALFocus: Use of New Digital Technologies at Cultural Festivals