The personal journal of Chris Brummel, who is currently evaluating his pizza-in-a-cup options.
The personal journal of Chris Brummel, who is currently evaluating his pizza-in-a-cup options.
(from del.icio.us)
We’re (CultureMob) throwing our first event in Seattle on Thursday June 5th at Neumos. ?uestlove of the Roots is performing a DJ set, and the night is hosted by Black Thought. One of my first thoughts after booking the gig was that I was excited to work with the iconography that is BROther ?uestion. I rushed to get a poster done so that we could get it out as soon as the details. Apparently, there was a little confusion between us and the venue: Neumos is using their own flyer under obligation from the artist’s management. But that didn’t stop me from doing my own run…
My original idea was to do a visual play on Shepherd Fariy’s Obama “Change” poster, but decided against being overtly political. So I moved on and decided to play on the vinyl/afro metaphor in combination with the mystery elements implied by the question mark.
For the last couple years, I’ve been working on CultureMob.com; mostly as a side project, but I’ve been on full time since last November. Designing and maintaining a site of this magnitude on a part-time schedule is something that I’ve learned is, as we call in the industry, a “no-no.” With so much fluid development, anything but your full attention will lead to cruft.
So I had a moment (along with Chadwick and input from Mike & James) to fix some of the issues that I had with the site.
We got rid of the map in the background and removed the overabundance of gradients. The previous design looked nice on paper, but the site needed to be a little bit more utilitarian and gender neutral. It’s damn tough to design a site that is everything to everyone; and we were finding that people were overwhelmed by the “military” feeling of the map. “We’re talking about brunettes, not fighter jets.” I don’t want to fully take away the personality of the site, but I can’t have the design detract from the information.
The typography of the site needed to be reigned in. We made the header elements clearer to call out the sections. Also, we made the links on the site more consistent. From an emotional standpoint, I think I like the links alter the “feel” of the site a little more than I’d like; but it’s necessary for the site to be clearer to our users as to what is a link and what is not. It’s absolutely fundamental.
It pains our developers that we still have 18% Internet Explorer 6. We spend a considerable amount of development time making sure that the experience in IE6 is as close to as enjoyable as it is for Firefox as we can make it. With these changes, not only will IE6 load considerably faster, but it will also reduce the number of complications that our devs will run into.
So take the site for a test run. We’ve recently added a handful of other great new features. Let me know what you think of the changes…
5 years ago, when preparing for the release of our first album, I was convinced that building the biggest website possible was the perfect idea. I could convince Felicia to blog regularly and the boards would be filled with more than just spam.
Last weekend, I decided to do something about the reality of the situation and design a more practical page than the Xanadoo that I originally envisioned. Post our dates, a few samples, post the necessary stuff for the press, and let MySpace handle the rest.
We’re going to spend the next few months in the studio working on an entire new set of material to pull out for the summer.
(from del.icio.us)
(from del.icio.us)
