Oso
About the Project
I met the Santa Barbara band “oso” in the summer of 2007 at South Union Arts. Since then, I’ve listened to their entire music discography on repeat for an entire year. I was surprised to find that the band only had a MySpace Music profile. I jumped to the opportunity to design & develop a website for these great musicians.
Concept and Design
I had a good understanding of what the band was looking for in design before starting. Oso operates under the DIY (Do It Yourself) in writing, touring, recording, and promoting. CDs they sell are wrapped in typewriter lyrics that are tucked within a cardboard jewel case. The jewel case features custom artwork that is protected by a thin layer of beeswax. To me, it means a lot when receiving something as unique - like oso’s music and art. I wanted to use their existing ideas, and merge them with my thoughts of column widths, image sizes, typography, and positioning in the design.
Artist, lead singer and guitarist Phil Taylor mailed a great amount of artwork. We spoke of dynamic art, rotating images, and content that’s easy to update. With a handful of oso’s artwork and existing content from their MySpace, I made the decision to assign a piece of Phil’s art to each section of web content. I had the idea of keeping the user from navigating to other pages when you provide the homepage with a healthy amount of content. I’ve heard a lot of criticism for websites being too lengthy with content… but I’m a believer in a browser viewport (cropping content tool) and a scrollbar. This keeps the listener listening. Listening to the music with a healthy amount of reading material. May I put my feet up on the desk?
Development
The website is built on Wordpress which is open source blogging software. I needed more than 2 content-types (posts, and pages) for this particular site. There is a great Wordpress CMS framework plugin called Pods which enabled me to create additional content-types for “Videos” and the “Upcoming Shows”. The photo gallery was put together using another great plugin called NextGen Gallery.
I was in search for a better font than a traditional web safe fonts, so I decided to give Typekit a whirl. Typekit is subscription service that allows you to deliver new fonts to your users without breaking copyright law. It truly makes a difference serving your users with a new web font which compliments the look and feel of the design.
Services Provided
- Content Management System
- Custom Wordpress Theme
- CSS
- Flash
- jQuery
- Mailing List
- New Web Font Implementation
- Web Design
- Search Engine Optimization
- SEO Friendly
- XHTML
