Building SoundNoir.net
Been working since Wednesday to pull together a design, then a programmed WordPress theme for the Sound Noir dev site. The image above is the front page.
I’d started out at Gimbel Library at Parsons looking through books on party flyers as well as poster design. In the end, I settled on using ideas I’d developed by looking at other sites on the Web. Not surprisingly, this made a lot of sense, as what I was building was a website, so why not look to other sites for inspiration.
Because I haven’t gotten much feedback from Andrey or Jacob, I’ve pushed forward with my own ideas. I’ve always wanted to use the image I shot at a No Ordianary Monkey of the woman lit from behind with a strobe light. Other people have been able to take it and publish it elsewhere, sometimes on other sites, and a couple times in print. This is the first time I’ve found a proper application for the image.
I loved using a huge background image on the front page. Making it work became a huge turning point in the iterations I’d been designing. It worked perfectly on the front page, but on any of the inside pages, it just seemed too much. I’d experimented with cropping it, but didn’t actually use a crop until at coffee with Jonathan this afternoon, he suggested a smaller image might be more suitable. When I got home, I played a bit more with crops and found something suitable:
Next up, I’ve got to work out the logo. At the moment, I’m using Autotrace-Nine, but I’ve only played with two other fonts, so it’s likely that this will change. Concurrently, I’m working on a business card that incorporates similar imagery. Because the general theme / aesthetic is the same in both instances, the two preoccupations are playing off each other nicely. Going forward, it could be interesting to shoot more people dancing in front of strobes for subsequent designs be they flyers or whatever else.
In terms of more work that needs to be done on the site, first I’ve got to work out the gallery section. The only content we’ve got for the site at this point are the photos Jacob shot a couple weeks ago at Andrey’s party, Funimal House at Monkey Town. I’ve settled on using NextGEN Gallery which appears to be pretty maleable. Now it’s just a matter of styling the gallery, and building some sort of sidebar navigation.
I’d say that up to this point, I’ve put 25 hours into the site, including research. There’s not a ton left to do, so I’m expecting that we can launch the site with what we’ve got shortly after I get back to NYC on Jan 3rd. Oh, I didn’t mention: I’ll be snowbarding for a week in Utah just after Christmas!
