The Shins (website research)

The Shins are hugely influential within their genre and music in a greater sense. Their artwork is always original and their designs are always interesting. Only recently have I stumbled across their website which has a beautiful layout and continues using the same visual imagery as their latest album(much like what I plan to do).

Designating areas to be edited and areas that are to remain the same constantly will enable me to design the website quickly and efficiently, whilst also making it easy and quick to navigate around for the audience

As the album artwork I designed in the summer was going to be printed cheaply I based my ideas around using one colour for the entire design. Now that I am given the chance to use as much colour as I want I don't want to use it. I really like how the artwork has turned out using just black and simple patterns and I think that this will merge from print to web fluently.

However we have considered images that we may want to include in full colour such as gig photos and flyers etc. Upon initial discussion we are thinking of using greyscale images which the user can roll over with the mouse in order to view in full colour.


On bands websites there are quite a lot of lists, dates, tracks, subheadings etc. Designing using flash I think the best idea would be for me to use a standard image size for the entire website so that no horizontal or vertical scroll is necessary. Like the image below where the user is able to scroll a menu without actually moving down the page.
Using columns will save space and allow for much more information to be shown in the same space. This will also save the audience from scrolling down or across.