Above Gewest13 decided the feel of the Solar festival was conveyed best through photographyAbove GeWest13 designed the lineup page, as part
of Phase 3 of the design process
How we built
The briefing we received basically
consisted only of translating the feeling
of the festival into an online platform.
In short, we needed to create a website
that did justice to the festival but how we
achieved that was up to us; we were given
complete freedom in this. And when we
noticed that the artwork we’d been given
did not fit, we were given the freedom to
work out our ideas.
What technologies did you use to build
the site and what were the biggest
technical challenges?
RS: The back end is a custom-built
WordPress theme using Highway as a
transition manager to create a single-
page app. The front end was built in
HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript ES6. All the
animations were built with GSAP. We
used the powerful Optimus plugin to
compress our images. This also gave us
the opportunity to serve our images in a
more modern format – lossless WebP – to
reduce the size by about 26 per cent.
What gave you the idea to use GIFs and
how difficult were these to get right?
RL: The design needed some motion
but we wanted something funny and
not overly hi-tech. So we created little
boomerang GIFs. Barend came up with
this idea and he worked it out quite
nicely. We utilised little parts out of the
aftermovies that had been made over
the years.The typography looks very original and
cool. Can you tell us about the thinking
underlying that?
BE: The original artwork used a
different font type that worked wellon print but not on screens. So we set
out to find a font that worked well but
which had a very similar look and feel
to it. We used the Gilroy font, which is
not particularly special but it looks very
friendly and that’s the effect that we
were after.Were there any challenges in getting
the site to work well on mobile?
RL: Of course, there always are! In
this case, we had to make the images,