As the HackDavis 2019 website officially launches, we want to share a little bit about the collaborative process members of the HackDavis Team went through in creating the site! This year’s website was made through many discussions, meetings, iterations, and teamwork between our Technical Team and our Design Team, and today we have Kaelan Mikowicz, Henry Moore, and Michelle Gore here to talk about their process in building the website!
Henry: “We chose the blue/green color scheme as those are the traditional HackDavis Colors, and we wanted to keep that tradition, even as the brand evolves. We infused those color choices with a circuit theme as it represents the idea of both technology and connection. In the same way, HackDavis connects technology to current social issues, utilizing it to leverage new solutions.”
Kaelan: “From a technical perspective, we seek to ensure the website is responsive, fluid, and maintainable. Simple is fast. As opposed to last year’s image based website, we’re choosing a design that is HTML at its core. We optimized our assets to ensure fast page loads while ensuring a consistent quality. Animating most sections of text and images allowed us to make the website feel interactive, without detracting from the essential information.
To improve the rendering of certain animations, we used translate3d() to enable hardware acceleration and rotate(0.0001deg) to fix the sub-pixel rendering on Firefox. These changes were done to ensure a smooth user experience.”
Michelle: “This is the first illustration that we made. We wanted to represent UC Davis in a futuristic theme, and so we created a farm powered by energy lines. This led us to our current illustration with icons for the three tracks, and flowing energy lines.”
These were our first sketches for our logo. We ended up doing iterations of the first one on the top left.
These are the second iterations of the logo.
And this was the final design!”
Henry: “Sometimes working with technical teams can be challenging, because some design ideas might not be easily implemented. However, from the start, we tried to envision and choose ideas that we knew would be more realistic given our timeline and resources.”
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