“Do whatever you want, man.” Those words are simultaneously exhilerating and terrifying to a designer. This was the mandate for creating the Audio Eagle Records Web site. Audio Eagle Records is run by Pat Carney of the Nonesuch Records band The Black Keys, with distribution via Fat Possum Records.
One would have to understand the sense of humor of all the people involved with the label to understand the impetus for the design. Really the only goal for the branding of this site was to be unique and bizarre, and I believe I got it there. The best juxtiposition I could think of on that particular day was of My Little Pony meeting Indie Rock. Throw in a few expletives in Cooper Black typeface, and one has a head-scratcher.
The site uses Wordpress as the center of its universe, and a few hacked plugins to get the desired effects: tooltips, photo lightboxes, etc. The Flash MP3 player was a nice opportunity to give a component that is normally a simply functional feature a bit of life. The inspiration for it was the last scene of the movie “The Secret of Nimh,” in which two crows fly off holding a piece of string. The visual has always stayed with me, waiting to be perverted for a goofy reason.
The typeface Cooper Black was a very important part of the design approach. On the Web, it goes without saying that typography is a pain due to its limitations. It’s important to point out that the work of Shaun Inman and the continued work of Mark Wubben on a Flash typography component called sIFR has changed the game somewhat for designers, allowing us to display neat-o typefaces for dynamic text.
Oh, by the way, the bands with records out on Audio Eagle Records are extremely good and highly original with a lot of pop appeal - you’ll probably be hearing more about all of them very soon.
Role: design and programming. Freelance.
The blog section: reviews of music artist Web sites and forthcoming tutorials for bands in need of cheap DIY Web sites.
[UPDATE: Steven Levy wrote an editorial in this week’s Newsweek about a tangential issue, namely how the pricing of music affects buying habits. He quotes an experiment that showed how to increase sales six-fold. Fascinating, counter-intuitive way to make more money and please the consumers.]
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My portfolio of work, clients include Warner Brothers Records, NBA, NHL, NFL, Visa, Nestlé and more.
Warner Brothers Music needed a Web site to promote the motion picture soundtrack to Beowulf, but the catch was that it needed to be launched soon after they contacted me. How soon? Three days. I don’t like backing down from challenges, and the opportunity to create a design for the property was an interesting proposal, […]
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My route from musician to graphic designer to interactive and new media designer reflects my desire to constantly learn new things. I hold a Master of Arts degree from the School of Visual Communication Design at Kent State University (studying under AIGA Fellow, J. Charles Walker), where I focused on interactive design and motion graphics.
Not being the type of person to follow traditional paths, I started my own design service after graduating. My first task was to update the identity system, print and online collateral for Nosco Pharmaceutical Packaging, a national company whose clients include Alcon and Abbott Laboratories. I also began adding music artists to my client roster by contacting people in my network from my five-year stint in my touring band.
In my current role at DigiKnow, Inc. in Cleveland, Ohio, I walk the fine line between designer and programmer by switching between art director, designer, animator, Web developer, and JavaScript/XHTML/CSS/ActionScript programmer.
Need front-end Web design or development work? Need to see proof? Click the link below to download a PDF of my CV with links to my recent work, personal info, contact information, and really self-congratulatory biography.