We build websites for musicians, record labels, festival, venues and music organizations. We are focused on modern jazz, so called "avant-garde" and free improvisation. We see our mission in providing support to none-commercial music.
In this article we are going to discuss some purely “artistic” aspects of website making. This is to share our approach to working on musical projects and designing websites in general.
Design of a website for a musician seems to be a very exciting opportunity to showcase one’s own artistic abilities. It isn’t obvious that such project imposes a lot of limitations. The first and the major one — all artists’ websites are alike in terms of structure. In most cases we speak of several pages — “bio”, “discography”, “bands”, “press”, “photos”. As long as hierarchy of documents is more or less similar from site to site the navigation is also much the same. Furthermore, musicians’ content brings similarity too.
Therefore creation of “unique”, instantly recognizable pages based on standard (for this type of websites) content represents a big challenge. It is hard to avoid self repetition... about as hard as playing weekly gigs.
Yet another, less obvious thing is that while you might feel very inspired by the project, you should keep your creativity on a short lead. It is a presentation of another artist, not yours. Strictly speaking, you are not an artist at all — you are a designer, and that’s different. Your mission is building upon somebody’s content; you really should not put it into shade with your “ultimate creativity”. Design is only stunning when it provides perfect focus on the information. Otherwise it is either bad or not design at all.
Drawing designs for musicians we accumulate impressions (received from music, personal communication, some basic bio data like age and gender, old website) and all sorts of inspirations — every little bit goes into the mix. Finally we tend to keep it quite strict.
One last factor — web design is not a painting. It must be practical. A lot of technical factors have to be taken in consideration. For example loading time, user experience (UX) studies, SEO — how well the website will be exposed in search engines, because after all website is a marketing tool.
Does the above sounds reasonable/boring? It should not. Limitations make us stronger! Well built things come out of many limitations and rules just like pieces of true art.
We don’t draw pictures here. We build professional interfaces based on broad knowledge in various web development disciplines. Design is here — it is a very important step in the whole technological process with a successful website as the main purpose.
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We are planning to provide updates on design4music initiative - our projects and possibly plans too. There will be a designer2musician advice column. The concept should gradually mature as it develops. There's a massive interaction with the musicians' community and thus a lot of invaluable information coming from first hands. Some of the news, exerts from interviews and selected posts from other blogs will appear on this pages. You can sign up for our RSS channel.
Here is a short list of main principles of successful design for a musical website.