Masquerade Ball 2019 was a service and fundraising project hosted by UC San Diego Circle K and La Jolla Kiwanis. With support from guests from all over the California-Nevada-Hawaii district, we aimed to raise thousands of dollars towards the Trevor Project intiative. The Trevor Project is a national non-profit organization dedicated towards assisting the LGTBQ youth through counseling, suicide prevention hotlines, etc in order to create a stronger sense of a safe and inclusive space of community.

During the summer and fall of 2019, I was a member of UCSD Circle K's Masquerade Ball Committee with the role of webmaster. As webmaster, my responsibilties included retheming the previous year's website and updating the information to correspond to the current year's event in order to maximize viewership and increase sales. Along with this, my general duties as a committee member involved the attendance of weekly committee meetings, volunteering stations at the event, aiding other committee members, and advertising the event.

The main design of the website that I wanted to improve on was the cleanliness of the site. I felt that the information could have been presented in a more organized way that was also easier on the eye. Also, since our demographic changed to be inclusive of older adults, I wanted to make it easier to navigate by having various details about the event to be spread through multiple pages, rather than condensed into a single about page.

The main aesthetic piece that the website had was a scrolling animation on the main page that I changed to be representative of the current year's updated event theme and colors. Besides that, I accomplished my goals of minimalism by implementing a very simple page style that focused mainly on the details rather than anything extra and overwhelming. Wherever I could, I looked to provide the site with colors that matched the elegant theme of gold and white.

I looked to take out or reduce bits of information that I deemed not as important as the rest, such as the specific directions to the venue. Rather than have the FAQ page visually contain every single question and answer directly, I implemented an accordion style drop down bar that reduced the length of the page while providing easier access to what a specific user wanted to know about. Also, a majority of my time was dedicated to fixing bugs within the site, as the desktop and mobile view were greatly skewed from each other, many elements were not aligned with the rest, and various screen sizes didn't correctly display pages.

Being apart of this committee helped me realize how much time and effort it takes into planning an event of this magnitude. I was still a beginner when I took up this project, but I was eager to learn and improve the site. After months of working on it, I was able to accomplish more than I had expected, continually editing and pushing commits onto the repository to trial and error until I was able to get it right. I gained experience utilizing Bootstrap and making elements of the site more aesthetically pleasing and uniform using containers and other preset style classes. I definitely feel more comfortable and confident in HTML and CSS thanks to this project while also improving upon my communication and teamwork skills by aiding the rest of my committee in planning and execute Masquerade Ball.