Project
TEDxChicago 2026 — We The People
A fully custom event landing page, hand-coded and shipped inside Squarespace's constraints.
- Client
- TEDxChicago — the 2026 “We The People” event at the Harris Theater, Millennium Park (Oct 3, 2026)
- Role
- Designer & Front-End Developer
- Timeline
- 2026
- Team
- With the TEDxChicago organizing team
The Challenge
TEDxChicago's site runs on Squarespace, but the 2026 event deserved a page the platform's templates couldn't produce — a bold, custom identity for the “We The People” theme with dot-matrix display type, the TEDx red quote-mark motif, and full creative control over layout and motion.
The constraint: it still had to live inside Squarespace — same domain, same nav and footer, editable by the team — without a separate host or framework.
What I Did
01 The page
Squarespace templates couldn't deliver the event's visual identity or the layout control the design called for.
A hand-coded vanilla HTML/CSS/JS page — hero, speakers, tickets, FAQ — with all styles scoped under a single root element so nothing leaks into or out of the surrounding Squarespace chrome.
02 The deployment pipeline
Squarespace only accepts pasted code blocks, and pasting a whole page on every change doesn't scale.
A build script that strips the local dev chrome and emits a paste-ready embed, with CSS, JS, and assets served from the public GitHub repo via jsDelivr's CDN — so most changes ship with a git push and a cache purge, no Squarespace edits at all.
03 Working within CDN limits
jsDelivr caps files at 20 MB, caches for 12 hours, and is case-sensitive — easy ways to break a live event page.
Large source masters stay out of the repo with optimized web derivatives committed instead, cache-busting is versioned, and the purge step is part of the deploy routine.
How It Was Validated
- Every change verified on the live Squarespace embed, not just locally
- CSS scoped with :where() to the page root — zero style collisions with Squarespace's own chrome
- Structured data (JSON-LD event markup) for search
After Launch
- Speaker lineup section built and held ready to ship the moment the lineup is announced
- Content updates ship via git push + CDN purge — no developer needed for copy changes in Squarespace blocks
The Outcome
The page is live at tedxchicago.com powering the 2026 event — a custom-designed, hand-coded experience running invisibly inside a template platform, with a deploy pipeline the team can live with.