Over the last few months, we’ve energized our design process here at Splash. We added a talented new group of designers who, along with our in-house team, make up the Splash Designer Network (SDN).
These designers push the design capabilities of our platform to new heights, advancing both the design creativity and scalability that we see being achieved with Splash. There’s been an explosion of beautiful event page themes created with our design tool, so we thought we’d share a few of our favorites to inspire your creativity!
The themes below stand out because they illustrate what a major difference great design can make in properly positioning your events to your target audience and exemplify the design process efficiencies that Splash enables.
1. It’s a Growth Machine, Splash’s proprietary on-the-fly event website creation feature — with a click of a button, attendees are provided with their very own, customizable event website.
2. It’s been saved as a Theme so it can be reused to make other Growth Machines,
3. It utilizes a new product feature, Linked Blocks, which you can design once, save, and insert (with full functionality) on any theme you create thereafter.
What makes it smart: This was created as part of a large campaign and every move is organized to speed up workflow and increase ROI from a creative production standpoint. The Growth Machine provides an opportunity for Attendee to Organizer (ATO) conversion. Saving it as a Theme provided the parent organization the ability to scale their outreach. Linked Blocks speed the creation of the design and structure while bringing consistency in style and function to these components throughout the campaign.
How it pushed the tool: The designer exploited a common button function (setting a link to the button other than RSVP) for an entirely new function. This creative use and way of thinking brings a whole new UX to this theme. The information is broken up in discrete sections so you only see what you want to see at any given time. It allows the user to curate their experience - to RSVP, to drop out, or to keep reading.
What is "smart" about the design: Each block is set up with the same simple structure. As you use the buttons to navigate, the structure of the information provides a consistent anchor for each section of the theme. All the information is where you expect it to be, without visual clutter or superfluity.
How it pushed the tool: The sense of movement in this theme comes from a very simple trick: by setting the body background as fixed it allows the blocks to scroll over the image while it stays in a fixed location on the page. This image, with crisscrossing lines, is particularly dynamic and a fantastic choice for this use case. As the blocks scroll, the overlap creates a peekaboo effect.
What makes it smart: The designer created a visual rhythm of proportion with full width vs. fixed width small blocks. Why is this so compelling? Fixed width blocks (the smaller ones) draw your attention to vital information, almost as if they were cards, and contrast with the full width blocks. The full width blocks expand the information to accentuate items like the cover image, speaker, and map. This theme is all about contrast and movement, which creates a delightful visual experience for the viewer.
How it pushed the tool: This theme is a hub, which is how Splash displays a calendar of events. With a hub you can display all of your events in one simple landing page and customize the design of your hub card. The graphic elements of the design mimic the signature serrated white stripes on Adidas's iconic sneakers. This was achieved by using a simple .png of triangles set as the background on our Color Mask feature. The positioning was set as Absolute, with the top left and top center values of 0, and a z-index of 1 to seamlessly align them to the top of the background.
What makes it smart: The design of this hub is very specific to its use case - a film screening. A clip of the film, as the cover block, immediately draws you into the purpose and content the theme is aimed at promoting. As you scroll down you can see the distribution of the film in different cities and are able to click on them to go to the individual event theme to RSVP. Since these individual events are part of a larger campaign they all use the same simple event theme for event and brand consistency. The design of the hub and the event theme become a sub-brand for the campaign.
How it pushed the tool: This theme pushes the design limits by adding decorative assets in left and right masks that are then dropped in transparency and size when in mobile view. Our mobile tools give you the ability to design for smaller screens - treating them as almost separate design environments that give you amazing control of how you’d like your graphic features to be displayed across devices. Unexpected and innovative, this simple design technique creates a on-brand experience that is different from anything we've seen before.
What makes it smart: A simple two column layout can contain a ton of content. The designer broke up the space by adding borders on the tops of his containers as graphic elements creating rhythmic breaks to each section that lead the eye throughout the page. The two column layout gets stacked on mobile so the elements stay large and go full width for easy readability. The design is concise but packs a punch.
