Oorzaken

Oorzaken began as a series of listening evenings in 2012 and a first festival in 2016. Today the Amsterdam foundation runs an international festival for narrative audio, an Academy with the NPO, Korte Golf, a three-minute podcast competition with deBuren, VPRO and VRT, Klankbord, where makers meet to talk about the state of the field, and a radio of its own productions. Its line is alles voor een goed verhaal, everything for a good story, and its ambition is to take audio out of the podcast app and make it a shared, cultural experience: in theatres, museums, on the street and online.

The new site, made together with Studio Roos Haasjes, gives all of that one address while letting each programme keep its own voice.

Wij halen audio uit de podcast-app en maken er een collectieve culturele ervaring van.

A barcode you can read

The wordmark is set in Oorzaken Mono, a face made of bars that reads as a barcode, a waveform or a row of faders. The site lets it run large: across the top of the home page, over the collaged heroes of Korte Golf, Radio and the Academy, and in the stripe pattern that tiles the footer and the filter bars. Suisse Intl carries everything else, from the festival’s long reads to the maker biographies, so the bars stay a signal rather than a texture.

Five programmes, five colours

Each programme has its own colour — the festival’s pink against a blue and black collage, Radio’s green on black, Klankbord’s yellow and blue stripes, Korte Golf’s black on white among stones, a chair and a cat — inside one frame of light blue. On the home page the five stand side by side as a row of posters with the festival pulled forward, since that is what most visitors come for. The index pages take the opposite tack and open on a single word — Makers, Agenda, Nieuws, Archief, Team — set as large as the screen allows, with a yellow bar of filters beneath it.

Carrying a decade of audio

Underneath, it is a Next.js site with a lot to carry: a filterable agenda for the festival’s two days, a database of makers by discipline and language, an archive back to the first festival, productions, news, vacancies, partners and annual reports, in Dutch and English. A radio player sits in the header of every page, so Oorzaken’s own episodes — a Nancy Updike talk from the 2025 festival, Korte Golf entries, Academy documentaries — are never more than a tap away.