Bsktweetup Design Revamp

Gamajo Tech was involved in the recent design revamp of the Bsktweetup website that offers information about the monthly Basingstoke Tweetup.

The site had been live since early November 2009, but was given a temporary design, so it was time to put something more permanent in place. I had the task of giving it an improved design, so I called in Gamajo Tech Associate graphic designer Darcy from Graphically Designing.

Darcy, based in Iowa in the US, was given free reign on the design, with the only conditions being that the logo was to stay as it was, and that the Twtvite invite was to stay in the sidebar.

Rather than go backwards and forwards trying to perfect a design in Photoshop, Darcy and I worked collaboratively on the live site evolving it as we went along. This approach to designing in the browser was new to Darcy, but provided instant feedback on the design in it’s native environment.

Working with Gary on this design was a lot of fun. Since they already had a logo and color palette in place, my job was to pull it all together. Since this site is based on Twitter, we wanted to echo Twitter’s rounded, bubbly style. Using a font face similar to Twitter, a bit of web 2.0, and the same radiant curves, we were able to tie in the inspiration for the site into the site itself.

I hope the design provides the perfect backdrop for the true shining star around here – the chance to get to meet local people.Darcy

There weren’t too many technical challenges on this project. The site and base theme were already in place, so my main task was to implement the design elements that Darcy provided.

The tweetroll was an added extra – instead of using the native WordPress widget for links, I decided to write my own function to achieve the same. This then allows changing the format of the links in one single place in the code, rather than having to edit each link individually.

Grabbing the Twitter avatar for each user was also interesting. I took the code implemented and described at Twivatar and created a copy on my own so that we weren’t relying on an site outside of our control. Now that Twitter have whitelisted this copy application, the images are being delivered consistently.

More information is available in the Work section. Though this was the first project Darcy and I had worked on together, future collaborative web design and development projects are in the pipeline.

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