EdFest
EdFest is a collaboration of leading Edinburgh Festival Fringe venues. We manage the branding, design and development of a cross-venue ticketing and discovery platform Services: UX/UI design, web development, ticketing integration and membership platform
We're thrilled to announce the launch of EdFest.com, a brand-new ticketing and discovery platform we designed and developed for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Built in collaboration with some of the Fringe's leading venues — Assembly, C ARTS, Gilded Balloon, Just the Tonic, Pleasance, Underbelly and ZOO — EdFest brings shows from across the festival together in one place for the first time, letting audiences browse comedy, theatre, circus, cabaret, dance, music and family shows and book tickets from different venues in a single basket. With capped booking fees, exclusive offers, an AI-powered planning tool and the new Love the Fringe membership scheme, EdFest makes the world's biggest arts festival easier to explore, fairer to book and better value — and we couldn't be prouder to have brought it to life.
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EdFest.com
EdFest — a collaboration of leading Edinburgh Festival Fringe venues Project: Brand, design and development of a cross-venue ticketing and discovery platform Services: UX/UI design, web development, ticketing integration, membership platform
The challenge
The Edinburgh Fringe is the largest arts festival in the world, but for audiences it has always been fragmented. Every major venue runs its own website, its own listings and its own checkout — so planning a few days at the festival could mean juggling half a dozen sites and paying a separate booking fee on each. EdFest's founding venues wanted to fix that: one platform where audiences could discover shows across the whole festival, book them together, and keep more value in the hands of the artists and venues who make the Fringe happen. They came to us to design and build it.
What we built
We created EdFest.com from the ground up — a fast, modern platform that unifies thousands of shows across seven major venue operators into a single, easy-to-navigate experience. Audiences can browse by genre, venue or date, save favourites, and add shows from different venues to one shared basket, checking out in a single transaction with booking fees capped at £5 (against up to £9 elsewhere).
To take the friction out of planning, we built EdFest Copilot, an AI-powered tool that searches shows, times and venues to assemble a personalised Fringe itinerary that works around the user's schedule. We also designed and developed Love the Fringe, EdFest's membership scheme — a complete system for distributing free and discounted tickets, exclusive offers and festival perks, while helping shows turn unsold seats into new audiences.
For the artists and venues, we built a self-service layer: producers can claim their own show pages, enrich them with copy, images, trailers and social links, and manage ticket offers and allocations — all integrated with the venues' existing box-office systems.
The details that matter
Light and dark modes, fast image and video delivery, smart search, a favourites system, gifting, reviews and a fully responsive design that holds up whether someone's planning from the sofa or booking on the move in the middle of the festival.
The result
EdFest launched ahead of the 2026 festival as the first platform to bring the Fringe's biggest venues together in one place — replacing a fragmented booking experience with a single, joined-up home for discovering and booking the Fringe, lowering costs for audiences and keeping more income within the festival ecosystem.