UppCon10
Event page for the Swedish convention UppCon10.
How can we make information attractive & fun?
Every single year we’ve created a new web page for UppCon. As the convention grew bigger, so did the web page and the information it held. After last years web page I began to wonder — does anyone really read all this text? I didn’t. There were tons of pages, many of them displaying a brick wall of text. Sure — we had a blog, a great shop and fun campaigns, but if the organizers wouldn’t even read the text, who would?
The word information makes me look for more engaging things barely by reading it, but this is what it actually boils down to — how do we make tons of information attractive? UppCon is essentially loads of people having loads of fun, doing loads of things and being spontaneous during three days at UKK. What if we could focus on exactly that, and create a fun way of exploring everything that happens during UppCon — from the opening ceremony to riding the escalator, or simply playing stupid games with your friends?
Making it simple
Everything that happens during UppCon, and everything you need to know about the convention, can be found through the explorer
The first step was to make things more simple. Where as the old page held six main pages, with some of them holding as many as 11 subpages, the new page displays a menu with only four choices — Explore, News, Tickets and Log In. Explore is the real secret to the concept.
Everything that happens during UppCon, and everything you need to know about the convention, can be found through the explorer. Every “item” is displayed with a unique thumbnail and a title, which opens up a page with pictures, information, related items and pictures from past conventions that relates to that particular activity (fetched from konventsbilder.se). The user can digg that item, share it or (eventually) add it to their calender.
It’s amazingly easy to get an overview over the convention, and explore what makes it so fun and unique. On launch day we had over 60 unique items, and we constantly keep adding as we getter closer to the event.
Production
After some heavy sketching I designed everything using Photoshop, accompanied by Pixelmator for some of the effects. The guys over at Agigen produced all back-end and front-end, and I used CSSEdit throughout the project to push pixels and play with the typography. It’s built with Ruby on Rails and jQuery, and konventsbilder.se was extended to enable fetching of related pictures for events.
Quick Summary
- Estimated time: 2 months
- Tools: Pen & paper, Photoshop, Pixelmator, CSSEdit
- Client: Uppsalakai
- WWW: 10.uppcon.se