Frosh on a Boat

McGill kept me busy in Summer 2009 as I designed websites for both Rad Frosh and SSMU Frosh, the two orientations open to all undergraduates, regardless of Faculty.

The theme for SSMU Frosh 2009 was inspired by a popular music video of the moment—one which I had never seen before, but I’m sure most of you were already digging it. I had to admit, it was a fun video. And I was excited to tackle the theme, to find something fun and juicy. But I’m on a Boat has one big problem. Most of what makes the video fun really has nothing to do with being on a boat. It’s more just about being super affluent.

It would have been inappropriate to promote such classist images for an event which is meant to welcome all students into the university. So I basically pushed the video out of my mind completely. Now that I think about it, maybe we could have evoked the Beachcombers (massive CanCon points there). Regardless, I thought I would just focus on the actual boat, and place it in something tropical looking (the irony being that we were welcoming students to Montreal!).

Since the SSMU is one of those rare McGill institutions that actually tries to be bilingual, this website had to be available in french as well as english. Rather than providing two separate sites, I decided to display both french and english content on a single page: english in the left column, french on the right. Since the website content was pretty static, I thought this was both easy and also showed a certain parity between french and english, which I appreciate.

Another thing about this project: we had close to 2000 people registering online, and using paypal to cover their registration fees. If anything went wrong with the system, it would have meant more trouble than I had ever dealt with before. Fortunately, Drupal turned out to be a great choice for this site. While it can sometimes be a difficult beast to wrangle, in this case I was easily able to pull the site together using core components, and it handled the whole situation flawlessly.

The coolest thing about this project is that, because I designed the logo along with the website, I got to see my work on all of the T-Shirts, Mugs, Tote Bags, and more! Physicality is so much cooler than digitality.