SoberLife.rw – Design & Build of a Neobrutalist City Guide
Emmanuel Imanishimwe
SoberLife.rw is a community-built guide to Kigali's sober social scene: 47 alcohol-free-friendly spots mapped across the city, a weekly events calendar, and the run clubs, hike gangs, and game-night crews recruiting right now. All the vibes. Zero proof.
I designed and built the whole thing. Next.js and shadcn on the front, Sanity CMS behind the content.
The design is neobrutalist: sticker cards, hard shadows, marquee tickers, wavy dividers. The hard part was making that systematic. shadcn stayed the building block. I kept its components and tweaked them one by one until buttons, cards, inputs, and filters all looked the part.
The map was tougher. Mapbox ships with its own look, so I customized its controls and markers piece by piece until the map felt like part of the poster instead of an embed. Here's the result:
"The map of good times." The customized Mapbox: satellite tiles, sticker markers, filters that match the rest of the system.
"What's on" — a custom calendar with sticker event chips. August is stacked.
The hero. "All the vibes. Zero proof." Stat stickers stacked over the cream background.
"Places that get it" — spot cards with photos, neighborhoods, and tags, served from Sanity.
This week in Kigali. The wavy dividers between sections are part of the design system, not decoration.
Crew cards on color blocks: Car Free Cycle Squad, Hash House Harriers, Kigali Run Club.
The closing call: know a spot? Run a crew? Community submissions keep the map growing.
Live at https://soberlife.rw
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Posted Aug 21, 2026
Kigali's sober social scene: spots, events, and crews. I designed and built it end to end with Next.js — shadcn as the building block, tweaked until every component went neobrutalist, a Mapbox map styled to match, and Sanity behind the content.
