The design is meant to look like the cover of a board game box and accompanies the web site's design.

I finished designing and building this year's edition of LeuvenSpeelt.be, a site that promotes student theater at my old university. You can read about the background in my previous blog posts.

The site is a simple Drupal installation with heavy content and theme work. The design is heavy on graphics and built as an experimental semi-fluid layout that adapts to different screen resolutions. Peripheral design elements are shifted in or out of the browser frame to make more space for content as needed.

Tools used: Photoshop, Illustrator, 3D Studio Max, TextMate. Uses the beautiful Fontin font available freely from Jos Buivenga's exljbris foundry.

And no, no easter eggs this year.

I just finished designing the poster for this year's theaterfestival at my ex-university. I already blogged about the websites for the event which I made.

The poster follows the same carnival theme as the website and reuses several elements from the 3D scene. It's rendered in a flatter composition and looks more like a mini-tent or puppet show.

Update: check out the poster I did for the event as well.

Just like last year, my (now) ex-university, the Catholic University of Leuven, still has a theaterfestival for and by students. Friends of mine organise it and I'm the resident web monkey and designer for their site and poster. The site's domain name means "Leuven plays" and is a pun on theater and plays (it works in english too). So, every year we try to base ourself on some playful theme when coming up with the promotional material.

In the past, there's been blackjack and chess. Last year's design came out really well, so I posed myself the challenge of doing even better.

I redesigned the site from scratch, this time using a 1930's carnival/fair as the theme.

Every year at my university, various student organisations perform one or more plays on stage. Though these are very small productions, they always manage to attract a good audience from the local student population. To give these individual groups a better chance, some friends of mine are organising a theaterfestival. It bundles the individual efforts in a nice event to provide more visibility and helps out with logistics and funding.

Obviously there needs to be a website to go along with this. I was asked to make it, so this year I decided to build it with Drupal.

The reason is that, aside from serving as a brochure for the event, the website needs to lobby to improve the state of theater at our university. For example, there is no dedicated theater for performing plays. The board has promised to look into this, but so far nothing concrete has happened. The students want to see change, so to provide more visibility to these issues, a theater blog has been started. It will keep its finger on the pulse of theater at and around our university and foster discussion.

So, a plain set up of Drupal? Not exactly. Part of the festival's charm and success is a witty style and branding. This year's poster, which I also designed, looks like this:

To carry this look over to the website, I had to design a fancy PHPTemplate theme to accomodate. The result is heavy on graphics and has a dash of Javascript. No AJAX though ;).

The website is in Dutch, but if you want to take a look (and hunt for some funny easter eggs), it can be found at LeuvenSpeelt.be.