CASE STUDY | PERSONAL PROJECT
ADE 2026 Night Map
Every dance event of Amsterdam Dance Event 2026 on one animated map, lighting up as the city dances through five days and nights.
CLIENT
Personal project
SCOPE
Data, Design, Dev
YEAR
2026
TOOLS
Claude, p5.js, JavaScript, Python
01
THE PROJECT
For five days in October, ADE; Amsterdam Dance Event turns the whole city into a dancefloor: clubs, warehouses, boats, bars and arenas, from early afternoon until long after sunrise. The programme lists well over a thousand events, but a list doesn’t show what that feels like. This project set out to make it visible: every dance event as a yellow square on a dark map of Amsterdam, lighting up when the doors open and fading when the night ends. The bigger the venue, the brighter it shines.
02
DATA AND ANALYSIS
The data comes from the official ADE programme on amsterdam-dance-event.nl. Only events listed there are included, no unofficial side parties. The 1,575 festival listings were filtered down to 1,114 actual dance events, leaving out exhibitions, talks, workshops and wellbeing sessions. The addresses of 267 venues were geocoded through PDOK, and the map was built from OpenStreetMap streets and Kadaster water data.
From the first Instagram version to the recap: venue capacities researched and the estimate shown as a range.
There is no public attendance data, so visitor numbers are estimated. The first version, shared on Instagram, used rough venue size classes. Feedback from the audience showed where those were off, so the model was rebuilt: real capacities were looked up for 36 venues, covering about 60% of all estimated visitors. Reported attendance and sold-out events were added, and the remaining venues were calibrated against that sample. Events that weren’t sold out count at 60–90% occupancy, and every number is shown as a range rather than a single figure.
03
DESIGN SYSTEM
The visual language is deliberately minimal: a black background, a dark grey city with the IJ and the canals in a slightly lighter grey, and ADE’s own yellow for the events. Square size stays constant, so brightness alone carries the scale, from small bars to the Johan Cruijff ArenA. A clock, a live counter, a top-10 of the largest events running at that moment, and a timeline of the whole week give the animation its structure. It pauses briefly at the busiest moment of the festival. The piece was built in p5.js in three formats: 4:5 for the feed, 9:16 for Reels and 16:9 for the web.
The same animation in three formats: 4:5 post, 9:16 Reel and 16:9 for the website.
04
RESULTS
The busiest moment of ADE 2026 was Saturday night around 01:30, with an estimated 126,000 people dancing at the same time (range 104,000–158,000). Over the whole week that adds up to roughly 500,000 to 975,000 visits. ADE’s own reported figure of 600,000 visitors for 2025 falls within that range. The Instagram Reel reached more than 132,000 views and was shared over 2,200 times. Comments from viewers directly improved the estimates in this final version.
>130k
Views on Instagram
Watch the Reel on Instagram