Elysium Website
Front-End Web Development (Next.js, React)
Duration: 7 months
In my junior year, I worked in the web development team for CMU's student run fashion club, Lunar Gala, which hosts the largest annual fashion event in Pennsylvania. The team's main deliverable is to create the website based on the 2025 theme, Elysium.
Process:
After receiving the theme pitch, our team first began with ideation. There are four sections of the show: Emergence, Blossom, Hubris, and Embrace. I was curious as to how to bring the narrative structure of the show into the website.


How can we combine elements of the natural world and man-made
technology into a cohesive narrative? In my Figma Moodboard, I drew
inspiration from nature photos, the Art Nouveau art movement, 90s
anime, and sci-fi films.
I noticed the similarities of the Elysium storyline and the
sensibilities of the Art Nouveau movement which took place from the
late 1800s until the start of World War I. During this movement,
people had a sense of optimism with recent technology advancements.
Artists combined elements of nature with man-made equations such as
French Curves, which were originally created for the sake of
mechanical linkages.
To bring these ideas to life without hindering the website's
performance, I used p5.js to create a dynamic background.
The devil is in the details–gradient blur is not natively supported in CSS. To create a frosted glass look that gradually changes in opacity and blur-strength, we had to make use of some practical effects.

Archive:
This year, Kaitlyn Ng and I worked on a new feature, an archive index that showcases the other creative departments' work.
This site serves as an index for the years to come, allowing future generations of Lunar Gala to preserve iterations that might not make it to final launch.

UI by Kaitlyn
Background video–photo assets are my own work
For the 2025 site, we wanted to use this unique opportunity to reintegrate elements of Asian culture into Lunar Gala.
2025archive.lunargala.org
In contrast to the sleek look of the main
page, the playful look of the archive acknowledges the number
of iterations that didn't make it to the final show–drawing from
Kaitlyn's and my shared experiences growing up as Asian American
women, we initially took inspiration from our vivid lexicon of
diasporic iconography.

Kaitlyn's Inspiration Board

Landing Page Draft
However, Lunar New Year is celebrated in countries beyond China–we decided that it would be more effective to uplift the voices of other students, highlighting their interpretations of the holiday. So, we turned the landing page into an open call, inviting Pan-Asian creators to design multiple landing pages.


The following are the chosen artists' working drafts–they will be updated with final versions soon.
Erin Hsu

Emma Deng

Gian Lee
Arin Pantja
Designing with modularity in mind, we also wrote documentation on how to add image or video entries to the website.

Archive Index

2025 Archive
Takeaways:
I had been part of Lunar Gala Creative Team for two years; Photo
Member in my freshman year and Head of Photography in my sophomore
year. My main reason for switching to web team this year was to learn
the best practices of making a website for a client from start from
finish. Also, much of my coding experience at CMU so far has consisted
of solo-projects to gain technical competency at a systems level, so I
wanted an opportunity to collaborate with other developers to achieve
a common goal.
Also, as a third year student, I found the feedback from my peers to feel a
bit redundant, which inspired me to seek critique from web developers
outside of CMU–thank you,
Ryan Yan! By doing
so, I gained fresh perspectives and valuable insights.
Furthermore, working on this project has taught me that the
integration of art and technology must be thought out carefully. My
experience in Computer Graphics offered insight as to what was
computationally feasible and what was not, but through collaborating
with designers, I learned that the Lunar Gala website should support
the content, not "show-off" the power of the fanciest library out
there.
A successful website for a large organization such as LG should serve
as a palette cleanser, not an experimental art piece. Coming from a
fine arts background, I had to put my selfish ambitions aside, but I
did not forget them; those ideas are precious seeds that will motivate
future projects.