An in-house initiative born from the pandemic

CityforCity was started on a voluntary basis at Idean Bergen. The initiative was a website where small local businesses that had been affected by and/or made concrete changes to their operation because of the covid pandemic are promoted to their local community.

The original websites for Bergen, Stavanger and Oslo were all built and hosted at Squarespace, but this soon showed itself to be very limiting when the ambitions of the project grew. Squarespace was generally bad at handling articles and categorisation and it was difficult to implement more complex features. Because of this, we decided to develop our own custom system.

My role in this project was sketching out and developing the new system. I decided to go for GatsbyJS for static rendering, and Strapi as a CMS system. After setting up the core functionality, I developed the frontend design based on an Adobe XD sketch created by a UX designer at Idean.