Guacamayo
A real, currently-gigging band's own site — built around the flyer art they already had, with a Shows section pulling live gig dates from a second personal project, GigSync.
Guacamayo is a real Chicago Latin/funk band ("Funky Latin Groove") that Doug plays saxophone in — this is the band's own site, not client work. The band already had a professional visual identity — a logo and show-flyer art from designer/drummer Javier Saume Mazzei — so the entire build treats that flyer as the design system to sample from (palette, lettering, the macaw imagery) instead of inventing a new one from scratch.
The Shows section doubles as a live integration test for GigSync (project 08 on this page): at build time it fetches this band's real gig data straight from the GigSync API, falling back to placeholder dates only if the fetch fails, times out, or comes back empty. That link surfaced a real bug — a gig with an unparseable source date crashed the entire homepage build — fixed by filtering out invalid records before they reach the page, the same "one bad record can't break the build" resilience already used for a full fetch failure.
A handful of small, deliberate interaction details separate this from a generic AI-styled band site: date tiles that flip once via a real IntersectionObserver instead of looping forever, a slow Ken Burns drift on the backdrop, and a hamburger-driven mobile nav that replaced an earlier horizontal-scroll workaround once it stopped holding up under direct measurement. Nav tile text colors were chosen from an actual computed-contrast check against WCAG AA, not eyeballed.
Live Data From a Second Project
The Shows section fetches this band's real gig dates from GigSync's API at build time, with a graceful placeholder fallback if the fetch fails, times out, or returns nothing.
One Bad Record, Not a Broken Build
An unparseable date coming out of GigSync once crashed the entire homepage build via an invalid Intl.DateTimeFormat call. Fixed by filtering bad records out before render, instead of trusting every upstream record to be well-formed.
The Band's Own Art, Not an Invented Identity
Every color, font pairing, and motif is sampled directly from the band's real show flyer and logo — a deliberate choice made after exploring and rejecting more than a dozen invented-palette directions first.
