Kirgawa
An event management, ticketing and analytics platform with sponsorship built into the product rather than bolted on beside it. My first full project, as the only designer.
Overview
Every event tool helps you sell tickets. Far fewer help you handle the people paying for the stage.
I joined at inception as the only designer and stayed close to two years, designing it, watching it get built, and living with the decisions long enough to see which ones held.
Event planning had no single place where creation, attendee management and analytics met. Organisers stitched the job across tools, and the seams were where work leaked. Sponsorship sat furthest outside the software: it funds a great many events, and it was being run on documents and inboxes.
There was no senior designer to check my work, which meant every decision had to be defended to a founder and to engineers, weekly, out loud. That is the skill I took from this job, not the screens.
The work
Five areas, from an empty account to a funded event.
The first run
A new organiser opens Kirgawa to a product with nothing in it, so the empty state is the product on day one. Every panel gets its own illustration, sentence and single action. Not one generic “no data” repeated four times.
Creating an event
Two steps. The first asks only for what an event cannot exist without. The second is everything that can wait. The meeting link is pasted or generated. Connect Meet, Zoom or Teams and it is made for you.
Running it
Cards carry a cover, a date block, a status bar and who is attending, enough to triage thirty at a glance. The detail view puts everything you can attach down the right as add-ons, so an event grows into what it needs rather than arriving with fourteen empty sections.
Sponsorship
Sponsorship is not a logo slot. It is a thing you sell, so it had to be an object. Organisers build packages with benefits, industry, price and slots, and Kirgawa matches sponsor brands against the event’s labels.
The edges
Auth screens with illustrations, because a bare form says nothing about the product behind it. And a marketing site with three tiers and a comparison table long enough to answer a procurement question.
Outcome
What happened
Kirgawa was built and shipped. Then EmmsDan Industries folded, and the product went with it.
I am saying that rather than leaving the outcome vague. A case study that ends in silence is worse than one that ends in a company failing. Most products do not survive their company, and that is not a design outcome.
What survived: two years designing a real product end to end, as the only designer, with an engineering team building it as I went.
What I’d do differently
I designed the full product before I designed the first week of using it. The empty states came later than they should have. They should have been the starting point.
I’d also have talked to organisers running events with real sponsors rather than reasoning about sponsorship from the outside. It is my favourite thing in this project and the one I validated least.
Screens
Click to select, double-click to open full size.