I recently finished renewing the website for a local event (a theater festival) at my ex-university. The site serves as brochure and blog around the event. Because the festival is mostly a promotional thing, a lot of work was put into the style and branding for each year's edition.

This year's design is centered around a 1930's carnival. The site is entirely powered by Drupal and uses a PHPTemplate theme with a CSS based layout that's heavy on images. There is also some JavaScript to make the ticket act like a real ticket (with punch holes and serial numbers) and 2 funny easter eggs hidden around the site.

The site features all the typical Drupal bells and whistles, like clean URLs. Every year, I clone the current site into another multi-site instance, run under a path with year the in it (/2005, /2006). The main site switches themes, while all the content is updated. The existing paths have the year in it already, so they don't change.

Whenever people ask me why all Drupal sites seem to look boxy and bland, I show them the sites for this event. Both this year's and last year's site are entirely Drupal powered. You do not need voodoo magic to pull this off, just a lot of effort into the theming and HTML/CSS.

Check out my blog entry about the site for more info or take a look yourself (also last year's edition). The site's content is in Dutch though.

Drupal version: Drupal 5.x