Arts festival website takes mobile-first approach

The Jacksonville Downtown Art Walk is a monthly arts festival that spans more than 15 blocks and takes in dozens of galleries, museums, bars, businesses, with street performers and live music. Its beautiful site features a watercolour parallax effect that makes scrolling a joy.

You also find hand-drawn lettering and an extensive use of icons.
The team kept in mind these assets during development. “Since it’s expected many of the site’s visitors will be accessing the site from mobile devices while at the event, we took a mobile-first approach to development,” says Chris Olberding, creative partner at Jacksonville agency Station Four.

“Using Modernizr, there’s some logic that blocks touch devices with lower device widths from downloading the very large watercolour PNGs with transparency. Even though we’re using the super-fast GreenSock JavaScript animation library, I still disabled animation effects that might be taxing on mobile devices,” he adds.

This showcase was originally featured in .net issue 241.

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