Zagreb Games Week is the region's biggest gaming and pop culture expo, landing 13 to 15 November 2026 in Zagreb, and I designed and built the site that carries the brand before a single doors-open date happens.
The brief
An expo this size needs a digital front door months before the halls are booked. The site had to look like the biggest event of its kind in the region from day one, not grow into that reputation later. It had to hold a countdown, a way to catch tickets and announcements as they drop, and social integration so the buzz building on Instagram and elsewhere shows up on the site instead of living somewhere else entirely.
What I built
I built it on Next.js and TypeScript, deployed on Vercel, the same stack I reach for whenever a site needs to ship fast and stay fast. Right now it runs as a coming-soon and ticketing and announcement hub: a single, sharp landing experience rather than a bloated multi-section site with nothing yet to fill it.
The design direction is modern and minimalist, digital-first, built to read well on a phone screen since that is where most people will first meet the brand, scrolling past a story or a link. Typography and layout carry the weight instead of decoration, because a gaming and pop culture audience can spot a generic template immediately and a fake one even faster.
Social integration was a deliberate choice, not a widget bolted on. An expo like this lives and dies on momentum, on people seeing it shared, tagged, talked about, so the site treats social presence as part of the information architecture, not an afterthought in the footer.
Ticketing and announcements are built to expand without a redesign. The event is over a year out from its 2026 dates as I write this, so the site had to be honest about being early while still making the case that this is the expo to watch. That balance, look finished, admit you are early, is harder to hit than either extreme on its own.
The result
Zagreb Games Week has a home that matches the scale of what it is claiming to be: the region's biggest gaming and pop culture expo. The site sets the tone before the first exhibitor is announced publicly, which is exactly the job a coming-soon site is supposed to do and so often does not.