Sheffield’s Gay Icons Project
Earlier this week (27th September 2010) we launched a site for Sheffield’s ‘Gay Icons Project’. The project attempts to define what a gay icon is, and invites visitors to nominate their own icons. Part of the project is a season of ‘gay-themed’ events, including lectures, music, parties. As the project says:
“Pioneering, tragic, martyr figures for homosexuality, gay icons who aren’t even gay…What constitutes a gay icon?”
This was an enjoyable project, perhaps I should say it still is an enjoyable project, as the client has really brought it to life, with thought-provoking (and occasionally humerous) icons and an active twitter feed!
The project brought us together with our old design partners at Eleven. For our part, we worked Eleven’s designs from paper into a Joomla! site, which we extended with a custom management facility for visitors to add their own gay icons. Aditionally, each page has the live Twitter API, which brings a frisson of excitement to the site, and encourages visitors to engage with the project.
For the home page we built a Flash display of photos of famous gay icons from the project, with an alternative static montage of photos for iPod owners. Less exciting technical stuff, the scrolling calendar to the right of all pages permits people to look through the entire events list, and is built using the MooTools library, which is pre-installed in Joomla. Joomla enables project staff to update content throughout the site.
Pity the project only ran to the end of December 2010, so if you have a gay icon, it is too late to register them!
