C2 · Week 3: Unsolicited redesign

The content is given this week, and serving it well is the brief.

find a real organisation that you like with a website that you don’t — and build them a better one

The classic unsolicited redesign. Pick a local club, a venue, a small business, an open-source project: anyone real whose work you rate and whose website you wince at. Say who they are, what they do and how to find them, better than they currently do. Liking them is what makes the brief work, because you’ll have real opinions about what their site owes its visitors.

Last week (C1) the content was yours and the look was the brief; this week it’s reversed. We’re still firmly in static territory, an informational site of pages, prose and links, with no logins, no booking systems, no backend. Full-stack sites arrive after the week 7 lecture.

This is also the week the training wheels come off the stack. C1 asked for hand-written HTML and CSS on principle; from here Astro is the course’s default static stack, which is what the demos use and what the starter drops into cleanly. The default is loose, though: any static generator, or none at all, is a legitimate choice, provided the starter’s contract holds (pnpm build still emits the site into dist/; the template’s CLAUDE.md spells it out) and you can say why your stack served this brief.

At the crit, we’ll discuss both: your new version and the existing one (via your link to it) and you can walk us through the calls you made. The redesign stays a studio exercise, though if it turns out well nothing stops you sending them the link.