Design Reference : Waiting for the gift of sound and vision
Back in 1976, David Bowie had a song called Sound and Vision, and this is the song that comes to mind while I’m thinking of web design.
Being from a generation that has a short attention span, I’m the type of person that often finds himself jumping from site to site within moments, and it takes something eye catching for me to apply the brakes, slow down and take a look. Sites like Deviantart are the kind of sites that I could spend all day looking at and YouTube is like taking some kind of retro memory trip that frightens and delights me at the same time!
Discussing the convention of web design, its easy to pinpoint not only things that I love about sites, but also the things that are blatantly obvious in their absence! For example, could you imagine trying to find your way through Youtube without a search bar? Yikes!
As I mentioned in my last entry, I’m focussing on recording artists in regards to the design of my site, not because I didn’t look at other types of sites out there, but because there is an obvious reoccurring style that showed up while looking at these particular sites.
Let me start by listing the five sites that I chosen for my design references;
Every one of these pages presents me with a gift of sound and vision of some kind. All five of these sites have a featured photo of the artist on the front page. It seems so obvious, but taking a look at the Official Roxie77 Site, you would be hard pressed to relate the page to the artist, Ryan Roxie, at all.
Three of these sites (Alice, Damon and Keri) also offer me the chance to caress my ears with the sweet sounds. The have small media players, mostly in the upper right hand corner of the screen, which offer a sample on the artists music. This is another chance to make the connection between the site and the artist. Once I see the artist and hear the music, I can be pretty damn sure I’m in the right place!
The conventions I’m pointing out here are three simple things;
My site should include;
- An embedded media player featuring samples from Roxie’s album.
- A simple design including a photo of Roxie as reference.
- A search bar to make site navigation even simpler.
Of course these aren’t the ‘foundations’ of a good site, and I will get to that in a future post. What I’m talking about here is more like looking at a meal on a dinner plate at a new restaurant. At first glance, its either something that looks appetising or looks like a pile of slop, its after this that you start looking at what’s actually on the plate. “Oh, its chicken, with a nice tangy looking dressing. It’s also got some nice looking salad vegetables etc” Chances are though, if it looks like slop from the get go, you might very well jump up from the table and head out to another restaurant, never returning to this one. This is something I don’t want happening to any websites that I will be designing in the future!
I want to keep these posts fairly short, and post on a daily basis. Please feel free to leave comments and thoughts on this and other posts.
Peace!
