Designing Sound Noir, Take Two
I’d been soliciting ideas and direction for designs of the Sound Noir website, but wasn’t getting anything back from the buddies. What I finally did was say, “screw it,” and I started off in my own direction. We met last week, and I finally got some feedback.
What Jacob said, and that Andrey agreed with, was that using the silhouette of the dancer may be a bit cliched, and could have the effect of aligning us with the big cheesy clubs on the West Side. At first I was put off by this — I had put a ton of time into the design — but after thinking about it, the critique made sense. Taking a step back and considering where I’ve seen women used to push music or parties at people I realized how similar the imagery was to the Ultra ads that pop up in the subways from time to time.
So it was back to the drawing board, this time with both Andrey and Jacob present.
We took a look through images that both Jacob and I have made. As it happens, they were struck by my flagship black and white image shot a while back in Sacramento. What we felt though was that the image was a bit too intense and didn’t represent the lighter attitude / vibe we’d like to create with the parties. Another thing that made the image less useful was that I feel it shouldn’t be cropped any more than it is. I like the image the way it’s currently designed, so reconfiguring it for different uses or orientations isn’t an option for me.
After a bit more hunting, we settled on the shot I took of the neon lights at American Apparel on Flatbush. One thing I liked about this decision was that the image can be rotated or cropped into many different configurations. Another thing that’s attractive is that the neon lights themselves are still up and can be re-photographed infinitely to achieve different effects. After working with the image, we took a break and stopped by the deli next door to American Apparel. I haven’t been paying attention, but the installation has been changed to incorporate different colors. Again, we can keep working with this source in still more ways.
Andrey had to bounce, so Jacob and I worked further to find a font we can use for our logo. Below you’ll see our use of Helvetica Neu. The design is what was mocked up mostly between the three of us. The idea of designing something that lives on a single, non-scrolling page came up, but I’m envisioning us having a lot more content that’ll require scrolling to view. What’s below may work well for a couple pages that have limited content, an “About” page being an example.
I’m siding strongly with the post layout I designed the last time around, so if you go to the Sound Noir Dev Flickr set, you won’t see much changing other than the headers of the site. Feel free to have a look and weigh in on the variations.
