Towards the end of July, the composer of “Battlestar Galactica” Bear McCreary, started a contest for fans to design the website for his band. The Battlestar Galactica Orchestra. With only a week to not only design, but also code and debug, I threw my hat into the ring along with dozens of other designers.

To begin, I choose once again to use Wordpress as my CMS. Making it easy to use by the end user, and also scalable. I also decided to try to avoid the trap of ‘fan-site’. Rather the inspiration behind my design was the question of ‘What would an Orchestra’s website look like if it was actually on Caprica and Government sponsored?’ My research began with sites like The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The National Symphony Orhestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra to name a few. All of which gave me a good foundation for how to actually structure the site.

Then it was time to get down to the design. I drew from resources like prop stationary from the series, popular design schemes from the show like octagons, and a muted color pallette to really give it that classic look. I also incorporated new design styles from the new BSG spin-off series, ‘Caprica’ which Bear McCreary is composing for as well. The header and logo for the band draws from the typography from both series which spans the gap and gives the site room to feature music from both sides of the BSG universe. Finally, I wrapped it all under the Colonial government banner and what came out was my entry for the contest!

The site features all the old standards like a biography page, a blog, links, and a press page. But also extended features like a forum for fans, an upcoming shows calendar, a music & video hosting page, and a store for all the official merch. Everything a band on the rise could want.

Though my design in the end wasn’t selected as the winner of the contest, I’m extremely proud of the final result. Especially with such a short deadline of only a week. And I’m happy to say that it’s cross-browser friendly (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE) and is compliant with CSS web standards as well as HTML before the PHP conversion for Wordpress.