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Project Objectives

My friends and I can all agree, life in college has been like a movie.

I wanted the look of the site to reflect this shared sentiment, with full-screen, in-your-face pictures of some of my most memorable moments.

Research & Ideation

I drew inspiration from A24, a production company known for films like Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Huge, a Brooklyn-based digital marketing agency that was behind the creation of larger-than-life experiences like Magentaverse for Pantone. From this initial research, I took down a few key notes.

  • Simple nav bars (and even simpler site hierarchies).
  • On-scroll text animations look great, but use them sparingly.
  • Not all assets are created equal. Prioritize the assets that fit the best with the text that’s being used.

Site Design

I focused on two pages of Too Close to the Sun: the Home page and the Details page.

Additional admin pages were created later in the week as I began to pivot towards the site’s frontend and backend development.

On the Home page, users can swipe through different collections as the background shows a blurred preview.

Each Details page showcases all of the images within a collection, along with the image details.

Site Development

I switched between several different platforms to develop these initial site designs entirely from scratch. Here’s a list of some other notable bells and whistles that were developed for the final site.

  • Admin-only pages were created so that I can add new events, images, and people without having to manually input the new information into the site databases.
  • Search tools were added to allow users to find certain pictures from specific events or with particular people.
  • An automatically incrementing counter of the number of logged events in the “Memory Log” was included at the beginning of each Details page.
  • Pages that are reached in error automatically redirect users to a previous page.

Databases were built and populated through phpMyAdmin, a free open source software tool.

These databases are the structural backbone behind all of the information on the Too Close to the Sun site (e.g. event information, image URLs, camera specs).

The site was developed entirely in PhpStorm. I flipped back and forth in building the frontend interfaces (in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) alongside with bits and pieces of the backend (in PHP and SQL).

The End

The finished site can be found here. A comprehensive walkthrough of the entire site (with access to admin-only pages) might look a little something like this (the file was too large to be included here).

Shoutouts

Special thanks to professor Patrick Dent, a faculty member at the USC Iovine and Young Academy, for teaching me all the basics of frontend and backend development. And an extra thank you for supporting me during this one week sprint (even while school was off)!

Thanks to Ellie Paik, Jenna Gestetner, Kate Mathew, and Sade Korbieh, the rest of my amazing team behind an earlier version of this site.

Work & Co

Trojan Marketplace