- Project: Halocyan Records
- Date: November 2012 - January 2013
- Client: Halocyan Records
- Tasks: consulting, conception, design and programming
- http://halocyan.com
Even if the name might sound quite new in the long list of electronic music labels, the roots of the Los Angeles based record label Halocyan Records go far back in the history of modern electronic music. And they have a lot of great work to show to the world.
Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, Youtube, Vimeo and similar services do a great job in showcasing and spreading any kind of media that is created throughout the day-to-day work in the music business. But all of these sites lack one basic feature: To display the entirety of the labels’ activities in one place, imbedded in a decent visualization. If you want to go without Facebook or myspace cluttering your clean appearance, there aren’t many possibilites.
So our basic idea was to create a portal page, bringing together the content that is scattered all over the web – instead of creating just another CMS with fully fledged media-support and handling, which would have to be maintained by the label folks in addition.
We took the original cover-art design – done by the notorious guys from TheDesignersRepublic – and let it serve as a paradigm to everything else on the website. That meant to work with minimal typography, basically two colors – and to stick to the dimensions of a record sleeve.
In order to prevent the layout from being boring and to give the label the opportunity to play with the styling on their own, we built a custom interface to transfer the visual idea of the “dis-aligned” text onto their site. Now they can pick every line of the text and slide it individually from the left to the right… or just tweak it a little bit more from the center.
Last but not least, the site should scale to every kind of mobile device and look as good on your 30" desktop screen as on your 4" smartphone. Therefore the whole layout is absolutely fluid and always fits the square content to the maximum size available – making the handling just as easy and simple as your old vinyl.
Also see Phtalo Records, the rougher sibling of Halocyan, where we created a colorful CMS for colorful covers:
Phtalo Records
Online release catalog for an L.A. based independent electronic music label
