We've been working on a new landing page for Purdue Hackers throughout the Fall 2022 semester. Today, we want to share it with you.
This website's story goes all the way back to May 2022, when we began searching for inspiration for new branding for Purdue Hackers.
(If you're curious, you can check out the full Muse board.)
At the time, our homepage looked like this:
It wasn't a disaster, but it also didn't communicate the soul and magic that we wanted people to take away in their first impression of Purdue Hackers. We wanted to follow it up with something great.
We were inspired by blocks.css, bright colors, and high-contrast elements. With these in mind, in late August we began working on the website.
Making this website was an enormous challenge. Each new section required thinking about three things at once: what story it should tell, what aesthetic it should have, and how to actually build it. Building this website was also the primary means through which we were figuring out our new brand identity—so this website was actually two major projects masquerading as one.
Typically, companies and web design agencies that embark on a project at this scale do it over months of sustained work, with a team of designers creating countless mockups and a team of web developers working to implement those designs. A rebranding project alone is often a sustained months-long process before they even begin thinking about the website.
We were three people, who are not designers, figuring it out as we went along. As a result, work on this website was carried forward entirely by bursts of inspiration, and was on and off throughout the semester.
The hero was the first thing we built, and has remained unchanged since August. The call to action at the bottom of the page, the email section, and the Hack Night section, were built throughout the first half of October. The workshops section was built at the end of November. Finally, the community section and a revised Hack Night section were built in early December, just before the website shipped.
This project was a labor of love that we spent countless hours on and that pushed us hard creatively. We're incredibly proud of the result.
We hope you feel inspired reading through the new purduehackers.com. And if you go to Purdue, we hope to see you around 💛⚡️