Anyone who has been to Frankfurt knows

The Frankfurt Book Fair is the size of a small city. Seven halls, thousands of exhibitors, a schedule that overlaps itself. Show up unprepared and you spend five days walking a lot and talking very little.

We know that feeling.

Expedition Frankfurt was born from exactly that: the difference between being at the fair and knowing how to be at the fair. For years, Cássia Carrenho has been putting together a Brazilian delegation that doesn’t just attend — it arrives with training, a curated agenda, its own booth and a network built before the flight.

In 2026 the project grew. A 24m² booth operated by MVB Latam, its own programme, guided tours. And the most obvious piece was missing: a place on the internet where all of it existed together.

The challenge

A project that happens on the other side of the world has to be understood from here.

A sponsor weighing whether to come in; a publisher deciding whether to send someone; an author trying to work out what they get from going — all of them arrive with the same silent question: is this serious?

A PDF couldn’t answer it. A sponsorship deck is a closed conversation that only exists once someone is already interested. The project needed a public address, in English, that worked for the international market and gave Brazilian professionals a chance to see themselves inside it.

And it had to ship before October. The fair doesn’t reschedule.

People first, programme second

The decision that shaped the whole site: the delegation comes before the schedule.

Ten people with a name, a photo, a role and a line about what they do. Not as an attendee list, but as an invitation. Anyone looking at that section immediately understands what kind of people are going — and whether they recognise themselves in that group.

An event sells itself on what happens. A delegation sells itself on who is in it.

Then comes the programme, organised in tabs by day, with times and the name of whoever leads each session. Ten conversations across three days, on a stage that is the booth itself. The information is the same that would sit in a spreadsheet; what changes is that it’s public, legible and ordered like an itinerary.

Market context as a layer, not a banner

Publitik came into the site as its own area — the global publishing market read in real time, right next to the fair programme.

We preserved the brand’s own visual system instead of flattening it into the event identity: dark surfaces, amber, signal colours. Two brands coexisting without either turning into an ad for the other.

Good sponsorship doesn’t interrupt. It adds context.

What we built

A static site, in English, live in September — in time to carry the final weeks of sponsorship outreach before October.

Hero, delegation, programme in tabs, tours, institutional content, partners with the official Frankfurter Buchmesse and Cássia Carrenho marks, an interest form for 2027, a privacy policy, event structured data and security headers. No database, no server, no runtime dependency: the build outputs plain HTML.

The fair lasts five days. The page stays.

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Notes for the nerds

Stack

• Astro 5 with output: static, no UI framework
• A single CSS file in cascade layers (reset, base, components, utilities), minified with LightningCSS
• Zero runtime dependencies — the build ships HTML and CSS, nothing else
• Deployed on Vercel, published automatically on push

Performance and quality (Lighthouse)

• Performance 94
• Accessibility 100
• Best practices 100
• SEO 100
• npm run build with no errors, warnings or hints; npm audit clean

SEO and structured data

• Schema.org Event with date, venue and organiser
• Open Graph and Twitter Card with a dedicated image
• Sitemap, manifest and robots.txt
• Content entirely in English, addressed to the international market

Security and privacy

• Security headers configured at deploy time
• No secrets in the repository: public variables only (PUBLIC_*)
• Interest form via a public endpoint, with no database of our own
• Published privacy policy

Content

• 10 participants with full profiles (role, organisation, bio)
• 3 programme days with 10 sessions
• 3 guided tours of the fair
• Partners area with official vector marks