Tigermag

During the 2020-2021 fall semester, I joined a Hoagie project subteam to build a brand new website for Tiger Magazine, Princeton University’s historic humor publication. Acting as both a web designer and developer, I contributed to the website’s design numerous mockups, made with Figma, taking into account the needs ands desires of the publication and its executives. On the development front, I acted as a frontend developer in building the publication’s new website with Frontity, a React framework utilizing Wordpress as a headless CMS. My primary contributions to development were the creations of base components for individual article pages and the home page’s content grid, as our team decided to build all of the website’s components ourselves instead of using an existing component library.

Aligning ourselves with the magazine’s core ethic — never take yourself too seriously — we decided to avoid the traditionally-stiff style of most online publications in favor of a scrapbook and zine-inspired aesthetic that suggests a degree of physicality and D.I.Y. construction without betraying the magazine’s characteristically not-so-deadpan satire.

Having migrated from a full-Wordpress approach to a custom-made Jamstack-powered implementation, Tiger Magazine’s website is now faster than it has ever been, as Frontity allowed our team to ditch the bloat of Wordpress and apply the flexibility of React and speed of static page generation to the publication’s existing content library. On this project, we used styled-components for styling, and this was my first introduction to working with a CSS-in-JS library.

Unfortunately, due to difficulties with domain access in Tiger Magazine’s administration, tigermag.com is not currently active. A solution is being worked on, and this page will be updated once the project is declared complete and the GitHub repository made public.