Website design and build
After meeting with the owner of production company Music On Screen I gained a pretty sound understanding of how the company was changing strategy and how they were now looking to provide a more engaging user experience online. At the time of briefing their only online territory was a single web page featuring an email link and nothing else. The whole domain was acting as a digital business card. Needless to say, it wasn't performing well. To encourage more traffic I drafted up a plan on how the site could be effective if it were a showcase of and testament to the artists and composers performing under the label and the audio work they were creating. The client was very receptive of my proposal to repurpose the site, so I began working on a new design that would offer richer, search engine optimised content, provide features and tools to serve playable audio tracks, and would feel fresher and more contemporary in both aesthetic and user experience. I built the audio tools and supporting back end for the site, sourced and uploaded the library of tracks needed from a variety of sources, and coded the front end design so users would now find a plethora of artist and composer biographies, a proper contact form and most importantly, a selection of tracks to listen to, rather than a stale and uninformative holding page.
I coded the front end to contribute a level of interactivity and motion to the user experience to enforce the brand's fresh and clean aesthetic. Soft fades between calling and dismissing playback modals and icon animation during hover states work together to reduce otherwise disjointed loading and transitions. The audio playback is also quick-fire in its loading capability and again, I've coded the transitions and appearance of the playback controls to match the softness and robustness of the brand.
Altogether, the result is a smooth and seamless service that allows users to dip in and out of audio clips effortlessly, exploring the music or each artist at will.
The logic I've coded behind the scenes has been designed to optimise filtering across the site. On listing pages, the entire library of music tracks can be referenced by composer, or otherwise by the client's own preference (typically championing those audio tracks accompanied by video ahead of all others). On each composer's page, before the biography text, a handpicked selection of their six most influential tracks from the library (again, with a bias towards video accompaniment) are filtered into view.
Logo design
In addition to creating the website, the client commissioned me to take a fresh look at the company's brand identity, starting with the logo. The previous logo design wasn't as imaginative as the client would have liked. It was essentially just a screen-grab of the former website homepage, in a very uncompromising .jpeg format.
I ran the client through my usual logo design programme - three stages of development beginning with ideas and sketches, moving on to digital renders of the stand-out few, and finally completing the digital suite from the strongest idea. Each of the logo design concepts (below) were in-keeping with the contemporary and clean look of the newly designed website, exploring hybrid composites of musical notes and video screens and related rhetoric. The final logo design features an upturned beamed note symbol alongside a trapezoid, together creating a subtle and rudimentary film camera icon. The trapezoid itself became a core brand component, appearing regularly on the website as a speaker/play icon.
Business stationery design
Shortly after the build of the website was complete, my client requested I design some business stationery items for him; a business card and compliment slip. A primary source of new business in the production music industry comes from face to face exchange and word of mouth promotion during events and meetings. It was important then that my client had professional looking business cards on hand for such occasions so that his new contacts could reach him and now visit his brand new website.
Like the site, his stationery is clean, modern and straightforward. A spot UV finish to the logo side of the business card was a beautiful touch we added during the printing process.
T-shirt challenge