I helped the team at New Harvest to bring the theme and visual identity for their 2022 conference—“the elephant in the room”—onto the web.

While this work supported the 2022 conference, it was originally planned to be used for their 2020 conference until COVID-19 came along.

I collaborated with Michela Caffrey at New Harvest to bring their idea for an anaglyphic graphic theme to their conference website. The idea was that we could simulate the real world phenomenon where colored films can reveal secret messages or graphics.

To achieve this effect on the web, I made use of CSS blend modes. When the overlay elements used a multiply blending, they hide the same-colored elements and distinguish the “hidden” elements underneath. This approach succeeded because it built on browser features, meaning it was widely supported and rendered smoothly. By disabling pointer events on the overlay, the website continued to be fully interactive while it’s applied.

After working with the New Harvest team to identify the pages and content types they’d want the conference site to include, I built the frontend as a Next.js application on top of a headless CMS. This way, the New Harvest team could update and iterate on the website content without my involvement being a bottleneck.

This approach proved especially useful after the COVID-19 shutdowns began and the team began to reevaluate their plans for hosting an in-person conference in June 2020. They were able to update their messaging to partners and attendees as they needed. On my end, I was able to quickly replace the site with a landing page that described the situation and prompted attendees to sign up for a newsletter for on-going updates.

While the conference was postponed by a few years, it was ultimately held in 2022. I helped restore the existing conference website we developed, with a few adjustments, and New Harvest was able to adapt it to their updated schedule and speaker lineup.