Archive for April, 2008

Launching the new Shlomo website

Posted in User experience, Web standards, Work on April 21st, 2008 by Jonathan Kahn – Comments Off

On Saturday we launched a new website for Shlomo.

Shlomo is one of the world’s finest human beatboxers, which means he makes music using just his mouth and a microphone — or sometimes with a loop sampler or a choir to help. He’s currently an Artist in Residence at the Southbank Centre in London. He also happens to be my brother.

More content than a small corporation

Shlomo is a prominent representative of a new breed of artists that shun the record industry in favour of promoting their music themselves — and often the web is their medium of choice.

As a result, at the start of the design process for this new website, Shlomo already had more content scattered around the web than I could really believe — YouTube videos, photographs, mp3 tracks, myspace blog posts, event listings…

The design challenge was to fit all this information into one website without overwhelming the user. We came up with the idea of projects: long-term themes that group events, music and writing together to hopefully form some kind of coherent narrative.

APIs

We used tagging to glue these projects to flickr photos, YouTube videos and del.icio.us links using those sites’ APIs, and to events and tracks using a home-brew CMS. The new site also features a WordPress blog, a bbPress forum and a twitter feed.

The Babelbox Podcast

Shlomo also launched The Babelbox Podcast, featuring backstage interviews and new music.

Fluid CSS layout

One of the technical highlights for me was the fully fluid CSS layout, with Flash movies (for YouTube video and MP3 playback) that scale with the design — accomplished using JavaScript. Check out the Music Through Unconventional Means project for an example. (In some browsers you need to resize the window and release the mouse to see the effect.) IE6 gets a fixed-width version, but IE7 gets the same as other modern browsers.

More to come…

This is the first release of the site, but we have more planned, including a possible musical project that uses communication over the web to create a collaborative piece of music.

Check out the site and leave a comment in the forum or send me an email if you have any feedback.

Credits

Graphic design and branding: David Caines.