Francesco
Scheffczyk

At the end of 2021, I was asked to help with the implementation of the website for the graduation exhibition of the bachelor's and master's graduates of the Department of Communication Design at Mainz University of Applied Sciences. There I was responsible for programming the website.

Design

The design of the website was developed by Alina Tepper and Benedikt Munzert as part of a course at Mainz University of Applied Sciences. The design concept refers to 1,429 steps. On the one hand, these stand for the 1,429 steps that it takes to get from the university location of the Design Department to the exhibition pavilion of the University of Applied Sciences LUX. On the other hand, the 1,429 steps are also a symbol for the many steps graduates take on their way to graduation.

Graphically, these steps are taken up quite simply as a number and also via scans of the graduates' shoes. These graphic elements also appear frequently in the design of the website.

The font used is Neue Montreal by Pangram Pangram.

Technical implementation

I implemented the frontend with the static site generator Eleventy. This was also the first time I worked with Eleventy. Looking back, it was the perfect choice for a project of this size, because I was convinced by Eleventy's simple setup. At the same time, it remains very flexible and expandable.

For content maintenance, the headless CMS Strapi was used so that everyone involved could work simultaneously and collaboratively on the content.

It was also important to me to keep the performance of the website as high as possible. For this, it was necessary that in particular the assets were web-optimised. To guarantee this, I implemented two image processing steps, one during the upload to Strapi and one during the build process of the website.

In the end, the website was compiled on my PC and then uploaded to a server at Mainz University of Applied Sciences.