Brass City Jazz Fest

Client Profile

Brass City Jazz Fest (Demo Preview)

Project Summary

Rebuilt the site for Brass City Jazz Fest, a free annual outdoor jazz festival in Downtown Waterbury, CT, as a bespoke hand-coded build with a late-night jazz-club mood. The cinematic homepage, marquee-style lineup board, full festival logistics, sponsor tiers, and vendor program are all editable in the prod CMS, with the design never depending on it.

Objectives

• Replace a dated festival site with a distinctive, after-hours visual identity
• Bill the 2026 lineup like a live marquee instead of a flat list
• Make festival logistics (date, location, hotel, volunteering) easy to find and share
• Present sponsor tiers and the vendor program with clear inquiry paths
• Hand the organizers a site their team can edit themselves through the CMS

What We Implemented

• Bespoke Vite + React build on the @gjl/site-kit SSR runtime, prerendered per route (SSG) for crawlable HTML
• Deep midnight-espresso surface with a single burnished brass-gold accent pulled from the festival logo
• DM Serif Display over Hanken Grotesk; signature "Marquee Lineup Board" with a glowing stage-bulb rail
• Cinematic scroll-reveal homepage, full artist cards, and a past-headliner history section
• Festival/Event JSON-LD, sitemap, robots, and distinct per-route canonicals
• CMS-editable surface (hero, intro, lineup, festival info, sponsors) via the seed + publish pipeline
• WebP imagery sized to the box; mailto-fallback vendor inquiry form for no-JS submission

Results

• Live, CMS-editable six-page site graded 94/100 (A) on the rendered quality audit
• Lineup, festival info, sponsors, and vendor content all server-rendered and indexable
• A distinctive after-hours identity that reads as a custom festival brand, not a template
• Sub-0.2s first paint, zero layout shift, on a 282KB / 10-request homepage