no tickets, no wristbands, no set route · East Crossroads, Kansas City
visit live siteoverview
The Fall Crawl is a self-guided bar crawl through the East Crossroads on the Saturday before Halloween. The brief arrived in one sentence: one QR code that takes people to one place for everything Fall Crawl.
That is a harder job than it sounds, because on the day the QR is printed the event does not exist yet. Venues are unconfirmed, the map has no names on it and the specials are not written. The site had to be publishable months early and still be worth scanning, then fill itself in as the event came together.
tech stack
design process
Everything that changes week to week lives in a single plain file, and the client edits it through GitHub’s web editor: open, pencil icon, change the words between the quotes, commit. No install, no CMS, no login to forget, and nothing to invoice for a typo.
The part that makes that safe is what happens when a list is empty. A section with nothing in it removes itself from the page entirely rather than rendering a heading with a void underneath, and the header links are built after the sections render, so a section that removed itself cannot leave a link pointing at nothing. The site is never half-finished in public. It is just smaller.
site preview
key features
design decisions
The brand orange is #C84008, sampled from the artwork rather than picked. It measures 4.19:1 on black, which clears the bar for large text and fails it for body copy, so it is held to display type, rules and hover while the copy runs in near-white. The display face in the lockup is not licensed for the web, so the lockup ships as artwork and live type uses a system stack. No font CDN, no embeds, nothing loaded from another company.
The QR code was generated and then read back with the system decoder to confirm it resolves to the exact URL. A QR that looks perfect and does not scan is the entire failure mode, and it is invisible until somebody is standing in front of a poster. It carries the heaviest error correction, so it survives a scuffed sticker or a fold.
Privacy and terms describe this build specifically: no cookies, no analytics, no storage, no forms, checked across every file before a word was written. The one thing that is true, that the host sees the request like any web server does, is said plainly. A policy is only worth publishing if it describes the site as it actually is.