Star Party Silverlake
Star Party Silverlake hosts a monthly night of stargazing in Los Angeles. We designed and built an interactive Shopify website for the event that does more than list dates and locations. It shows visitors the sky above Silver Lake as it is right now, brings in new NASA imagery every day, and gives the community a place to stay connected between gatherings. The site won Best UI Design, Best UX Design, and Best Innovation at the CSS Design Awards.
About Star Party Silverlake
Star Party Silverlake is an outdoor astronomy event held once a month in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. Neighbors, first-time stargazers, and longtime sky watchers gather to look up together. The founder comes from a fashion design background and wanted the website to feel as considered as the event itself: part community hub, part shop, and part window into the night sky.
The Challenge
Most event websites are static. They list a date, a location, and a signup form, and they look the same at noon as they do at midnight. Star Party Silverlake is about something that changes every minute. The brief was to build a site that felt alive and gave people a reason to come back between events. It also had to handle the practical work: event details, newsletter signups, and merch sales. Shopify gave us the commerce foundation. The design challenge was making an interactive Shopify website that felt closer to a planetarium than a storefront.
A Live Sky Hero for an Interactive Shopify Website
The homepage hero runs Virtual Sky, an open-source JavaScript planetarium, locked to Silver Lake’s GPS coordinates. It calculates the positions of the stars, planets, and constellations in the browser. Every visitor sees the sky above Silver Lake at the moment they land on the page, day or night. Visit tonight and again next week, and the sky will have moved.
A ticker beneath the hero tracks the live time, the coordinates, and details for the next star party. The idea is simple to read and hard to forget: the website shows the same sky the event gathers under. It also does practical work for the event. A site that changes gives people a reason to return, and every return visit puts the next event date in front of them.
NASA Imagery and an Animated Star Field
The About page opens with NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, pulled through the NASA API along with its title. The image updates automatically every day, so the interactive Shopify website stays fresh without anyone on the Star Party team touching it. Each visit to the About page can introduce someone to a nebula, a galaxy, or a planetary close-up they hadn’t seen before.
Beneath it, a quieter animated star field sets the tone for the story of the event: a black background with stars that fade in and out across the frame. Together, the three heroes show the sky three ways: live, photographed, and imagined.
Community and Commerce in One Interactive Shopify Website
Behind the visual layer, the site handles the everyday work an event brand needs. Visitors can find details for the next gathering, sign up for the newsletter, and shop limited-run merch drops. The founder’s fashion background shaped the merch approach: small releases instead of print-on-demand, presented with the same care as the rest of the site.
Keeping events, email, and merch on Shopify means the team manages everything from one admin. As the community grows, the site has room to grow with it, whether that means new product drops, partnerships, or private events.
Award-Winning Interactive Shopify Website Design
Star Party Silverlake won Best UI Design, Best UX Design, and Best Innovation at the CSS Design Awards, voted by the public. The recognition reflects what we set out to build: a site that is easy to use, distinct to look at, and built on technology most event websites never touch. It remains one of the projects we are proudest of.
Building Your Own Interactive Shopify Website
Hayda Studios is a Los Angeles web design and development studio specializing in Shopify. We build custom Shopify experiences for brands in fashion, wellness, lifestyle, and culture, from full storefronts to sites like this one that blur the line between website and experience. Every project starts with what makes the brand different, then builds the site around it.
If you have an idea that a standard template can’t hold, explore our services or get in touch to start a conversation.
Star Party Silverlake
Star Party Silverlake is a monthly outdoor stargazing night in Los Angeles, bringing the neighborhood together under the sky above Silver Lake. With a growing newsletter, limited-run merch drops, and a community built around curiosity and connection, it has become one of the city’s most distinctive local events.
We designed and built the site around the sky itself. It connects to live astronomical data and NASA’s daily imagery, so the site changes with the sky it celebrates. It also brings together event details, newsletter signups, and merch, keeping the community connected between gatherings.
The site won Best UI Design, Best UX Design, and Best Innovation at the CSS Design Awards.
Awards
DELIVERABLES
Shopify Web Design + Development
UI/UX
The live sky
Our homepage hero runs Virtual Sky, an open-source JavaScript planetarium, locked to Silver Lake’s GPS coordinates. It calculates the sky in the browser, so visitors see where the planets and constellations are above Silver Lake at that moment, day or night. A ticker beneath it tracks the live time, the coordinates, and details for the next star party. Every visit shows a different sky, which ties the site to the event it promotes.
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