Written in
the stars.
CPAK (the Conference on Precession & Ancient Knowledge) has been running for two decades. For its fourteenth edition I redesigned and rebuilt the whole site: a new night-sky brand direction, optimized for desktop and mobile, with SMS collection built for conversion. Live at cpakonline.com ↗
/01 · Brief
Fourteen
editions in.
CPAK gathers researchers, authors, and explorers around one big idea: that celestial cycles shaped ancient civilizations, and that those civilizations knew it. Nineteen presenters, three days, every September.
The site hadn't kept up. A dated WordPress install was slow, fragile, and hard to update between editions. The brief: make the web presence feel like the conference (rigorous, a little cosmic) and make registration easy before CPAK XIV opens in Newport Beach, September 2026.
/02 · Design
Night sky,
gold type.
The identity starts where the subject does: a deep-navy starfield, an editorial serif, and gold italics doing the celestial work. It reads more like an observatory journal than a tech conference.
Every surface got the treatment: presenter cards that lead with the talk, a scannable three-day schedule, venue and travel pages, a poster archive going back years, and a bookshop of presenter titles.
/03 · Build
No plugins,
no drag.
The WordPress stack went away entirely. The new site is hand-coded static: eleven pages, no plugins to break, nothing to patch, and it loads in well under a second.
Registration runs on Square, and the analytics are wired for a post-ad-blocker world: purchases are verified server-side against the Square Orders API, then a Cloudflare Worker forwards each one to Meta's Conversions API and GA4, so ad attribution reflects real ticket sales, not pixel guesses.
