The promotional website for American Mavericks contemporary music festival just went live a few days ago. I developed this site and also did most of the design, working with the folks at the San Francisco Symphony to use existing assets and concepts and translate them into an attractive website, with a WordPress backend so their team can manage the content after launch. I love working with WordPress, not least because I have experience with it already, but I learned a few new things in the process.

My initial designs used custom typefaces, but eventually we went with standard websafe fonts (Helvetica/Arial) due to font rendering issues on Windows browsers—not just IE, but the problems were all in Windows. More flexible typography on the web is coming, but this project was a reminder that there are still major hurdles if you need the site to work in all browsers on all platforms—on personal projects I can be a bit more risky.

The Mavericks festival is part of the San Francisco Symphony’s centennial season. The series, taking place here in SF, and in Chicago, Ann Arbor, and New York, will be loaded with edgy modern compositions by the likes of Harry Partch, John Cage, Terry Riley, and Edgard Varèse (+ more).