Album Covers Idea

This is just a quick idea, about creating an album cover as a design idea for web page.

one idea is adapted by using the Beatles Let it be, album cover,

I have adapted it, by using the style of the images of the 4 members of the band, by adding Midnight High in it.  This should be a good background for the website. Here's a brief draft example, 

Here is another example, 

Unfortunatly, there are no clear images of the guys facing forward clearly, without having different effects of the images or the resolutions varying. The best image I can come up with now (which isn't fantastic) is this one.

 

Still keeping with the Americana theme as the back ground. This is only a quick 5 minute test, I'm going to go out and take pictures of them all together to get better images. 

Here is the famous album from the Clash. I like the idea of the vertical and horizontal text, with the main image of the guitar being smashed. I want to create something similar to this iconic image. 

The text needs changing, but overall, i like this image. 

Now i'm going to attempt to place a header and a content box on these designs. to see how they would suit as website backgrounds. 

Using the idea , I have used this back ground with having orange transparent blocks to represent the header and content boxes. I like it. It would be brilliant is I could include more colours for the context box. For example, still having it transparent, but with the images in it. 

I like this idea too. Similarly having the boxes transparent the band in the background are now visible.  

I think, I might have work between the two ideas for back grounds, by adding images and content to see which one fits. 

The Fonts

This blog post is going to be dedicated to the fonts of the website.
After previewing many fonts from da font, I have came up with a sheet of 17 different fonts, all with the bands name. Out of them, I will choose 4-5 and when available edit them in photo shop/illustrator and see what I can create.

Out of the rest of those fonts, I decided to choose, these....

I chose the first one, because it reminded me of the wild west, cowboys and Indians style, and it also looks like a childish cartoon font. 

I chose the second one as well for a similar reason. It is basic, and effective. With just the outline to this font, it would be easy to add colour to it. 

I'm not too sure about the third one. I like the detail at the bottom of each letter, but my main concern is that the "M" is almost identical to the "H".

The forth and final one, I like, because like the second one, it is basic, and it has that "tattoo charm" I am looking for. I think it would be better for the title of the page instead of using it as a font in the content boxes as it could get monotonous and hard to read. 

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Here are some examples of the text with a example header,

This isn't really great, but it's not bad.

I really like this design... Even though it's a draft, it could be really effective.

Nope.. don't like it at all!

This would be really good, if there was a tattoo scroll behind the letters. Without the white background, they fade into the background. 

I think I might work on the Second and Forth ideas. They just seem to work. The plain black and white idea could work really well, with the Jaime Hernandez theme. 

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I tried out the fonts in the content box, but unfortunatly, they were not very ledgible . So I thought it would be better after looking at other bands websites for inspiration, to have a basic font. A basic font such as Arial, Times New Roman etc...

The Arial font is nice, but it is too thick....

I prefer the font when it is smaller instead of when it is big, 

Here is an example of 3 other fonts, (Franklin Gothic, Raavi and Viner Hand) ... I still prefer the Arial.

Arial with a contrasting colour will be amazing and it will make the writing stand out.... Black and white seem like a good choice 

Ideaaa

With this blog, I am also creating a sketch book with ideas. One of the design ideas for the website is a tattoo theme. It is easier for me to trace/draw tattoo's on paper, so then I can edit them by hand and then scan them into the computer.

It is then easy to trace around the sketch in either Illustrator or Photoshop. This example was done in Illustrator, but most of the tattoo design work was created on photoshop.

And there we go :)

NOSE ART and Jaime Hernandez

Have you ever seen the world war 2 films, where they hero's flying the aeroplane, with a cartoon pin up girl on the nose of the plane. And he always manages to save the world and get the girl? WELL The cartoon pin up girl on the nose of the plane is called 'nose art'.... here's a couple of pictures,

Which I'm trying to link this with Jaime Hernandez pictures, keeping a strict black and white theme,

And also add a vintage tattoo design...

FUN!!

Check the sketch book for updates and ideas.

Vector this, vector that.

After a conversation with some of the band members, we agreed on a few ideas that they seemed happy with the webpage. They have talked among themselves and decided they really wanted to either have,

• An Americana theme, keeping with the style the images have been taken here . They would like a vector style theme of their images combined together with a similar effect on each. Also having a 1950's diner and rock 'n' roll theme. 
• After accidental sending them the blog from last year instead of this one, they really liked the old school tattoo pin up girl/vintage tattoo.The I accentually sent them was this one... http://mattnasher.blogspot.com/

See sketch book for the random tattoo designs. On this blog I'm going to keep all the computer visuals I want to use and stuff that I have edited.


Here's some images that I have used in illustrator.

Vector is....

How does this look?

I want to keep the design of the website simple, and the colours similar to the styles of the pictures that I have. For experimental purposes I have copied the content box layout of the Mumford and Sons website and went from there.

I used this image of the bad and cut the top and bottom off it and then used it as an experimental header, 

I really liked the idea of having the "content" box broken down into 3-4 boxes, so I applied that to the design of my website.

For the Background, I went on google images and typed in Arizona, to fit in with the style of the header, and came up with the back ground for the page.

And here is the semi finished product, keeping the colours of the boxes on the page similar to the oranges and yellows of the images.

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I have also noticed a trend of menu bars on band websites. The most popular ones are, 

• Home
• Information
• Tour Dates
• Merchandise
• Facebook/twitter
• Photographs

I think I will take advantage of this and adapt the ones I think will go with the ban website.

Enjoy :) 

Music and The Design

Seeing as this is a band website, and many popular bands have their songs playing on their website, for example, 

For the front page I want a song playing automatically. I unfortunately don't have Midnight Highs CDs or MP3s at my disposal at the minute, so I have to make do with their tracks already on-line. They have uploaded their songs via Sound Cloud, which has an embedding feature, which allows its users to copy the songs and embed them on what ever website they like to share. 

To add one of their songs to my front page, I have gone on to their Facebook

Clicked on a song which is directed to the left hand side of their Facebook profile.

I then clicked on "Share", which is directly above the play button.

Then that brings this little box up which allows the user to change the colour of the playing box. I think copied the link, and added it to the Footer of my website. I thought it would be better there as it is sort of out the way, so it wont distract the user from looking at the main features of the website. 

Afterwards it looked like this  :)