Volt
Thirty countries on one platform, without thirty designs.
Thirty-plus countries, hundreds of local divisions, thousands of volunteers, one brand. Volt is the pan-European political movement, and at Super Interactive I designed the multisite platform that carries all of it: one CMS, one design system, thirty-plus country sites. Every decision came back to the same tension: a professional, unified brand across Europe, and local teams with real control over their own story.
Role
Design Lead, at Super Interactive
launch
2023
Scope
Strategy, UX/UI, Design System
Scale
30+ country sites
Live
The Challenge
Thirty countries meant thirty teams that publish in their own language, run their own campaigns and answer to their own communities, most of them volunteers rather than professionals. Building thirty sites was out of the question; building one rigid site would have been rejected by the people who had to live in it. The platform had to hold a single brand together while handing real editorial control to hundreds of local divisions, and it had to survive the moment that matters most in politics: election time, when everything gets published at once.
The Design
Journeys for five audiences at once.
Visitors, voters, members, volunteers and campaign organisers arrive at the same site with entirely different intentions. I mapped those journeys first and let them drive the structure, the navigation logic and what each page type is allowed to do, so a voter finds a position in two clicks while an organiser runs a local campaign from the same system.
From Amsterdam-West to Volt Europa. Every division is a site in the same system.
A hard line between fixed and free.
The component system draws a hard line between what's fixed and what's local. Brand, typography, core structure: fixed. Content, events, campaigns, local emphasis: free. Local teams got enough control to make the site theirs, and not enough to break it.
The hero component. Brand, type and layout locked. Content belongs to the local team.
Blocks that travel between countries.
Modular event blocks, news feeds, campaign call-outs, donation flows: reusable across every country, adaptable within each. Built in Statamic for flexibility and performance, and tested module by module with Volt’s Dutch team before anything scaled.
Petition call-out, newsletter block, updates feed. The same blocks on every country site.
Where it stands now
The 2023 Dutch elections were the stress test.
Volt campaigned nationally and locally on the platform, with teams publishing and updating daily. Design, structure and tech held. It has been carrying campaigns across Europe since: less a website than a campaign machine, which is what it was designed to be.
Contact
Want to ship products together?
I'm looking for a team where design doesn't stop at handoff. If that sounds like yours, I'd like to hear about it.
Send me a message at martijnruitenbeek@gmail.com
Find me on LinkedIn