DONEBYSIMON

Textivalkrant

A mobile program guide with a funny twist

Textivalkrant

For a local festival I was asked to make some kind of digital program guide. There was a focus on reducing the amount of print, so a dedicated mobile site for the schedule and other useful information was a logical approach.

To keep the sponsors happy, they also had to be given some exposure there. The problem was: how to display more than 20 sponsors on a mobile site? No one would sit back and swipe to a carousel of sponsors.

Butt crack

The theme of the festival was ‘construction’ and low hanging pants was already been mentioned a couple of times. So I came up with the idea of hacking the mobile page refresh. Instead of refreshing the page, one would pull down a construction workers pants and a new sponsor would pop up.

The pull down hack was implemented quite easily. Off course there were some differences between Android and iOS, but they were easily resolved.

A screenrecording of a mobile site where pants are pulled down via the refresh guesture

Probability

To decide which sponsor would pop up, I wrote a serverless function that returns a specific sponsor, the higher they sponsored, the bigger the chance they will be returned.

I based the algorithm on this genius piece of code. I don’t entirely grasp how it works, but it does…

Everyone that had to publish something with lots of sponsors on it gets it: all those logos with different colors, orientations, and dimensions are terrible to work with. I wanted them all to be at the bottom of the screen, like a banner. But that meant that I had to get them within the same dimension, pick a background color, center the logo and so on. And when it would turn out that they needed some more padding, I would have to do it all over again. I don’t think there was any extra motivation necessary to script this job.

The result

You can have a look at textivalkrant.vercel.app but be aware it was meant to be viewed on a mobile device. People scanned QR codes that were on the tables.

Credits

I can’t finish this post without giving credits to Pieter Depoortere and Agata Smok for the graphics and style guidance. Go check them out.