We designed the website together initially and then Abdullah carried out the main laborious work.
As a result, he wrote the initial post and I will just be quoting him since he has explained everything perfectly and since this is a group task, there is not point in me saying the same thing in my own words when he has already explained it all.
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ELAN’s website can be found here:
We decided early on to use Wix, as it allows the greatest amount of control over design elements.
A quick overview of each section on the website. There are three: Home, Music and News. This selection was based on research of indie and alternative artists’ websites, including Perfume Genius, St. Vincent, James Blake and of course, Björk. All of these artists had these three sections on their pages, as well as a “Store” tab (but we could not recreate this, as Wix does not allow the creation of a store without linking to actual, available products).
We wanted to maintain a black-and-white and minimalist look across the website, to keep it consistent with the theme of the album campaign. On the Home page, the selection of elements was again based on research of existing websites. At the top, we placed the name of the artist, along with a video loop of Humayun staring into the camera, to give the website a dynamic element.
Underneath this, we added a music player, through which users could stream a song by ELAN called “Great White Gravity” (an original of mine).
We then have our music video, embedded right on the front page for easy access. The thumbnail was edited in Photoshop to be black-and-white, to keep the color palette consistent.
Below this, we have a biography of the artist, and then a section in which users can input their email addresses for access to a mailing list (both features were found on all websites researched). The biography was written by me, and it incorporates many tropes of alternative musicians’ careers.
The Music and News sections were slightly more challenging. The Music section begins with another music player, which plays the same song as the Home page, but underneath that is listed the discography of Elan. This required the development of multiple different album titles and covers, as well as descriptions of their release histories and sonic styles. I began by designing the covers and titles.
For the first album, I used a picture I had taken of my sister in a car, put it through a filter on the app Prisma, and added text via Photoshop. The name “Capable Negativity” is a darkly humorous play on the concept of “negative capability”.
The second album I used a more creative method to name: I typed “how” into my Notes app, and tapped the middle button on the predictive type function above the keyboard. The phone generated words depending on contextual clues, and it resulted in the name “how dare the insipid, we have no change” (in all small letters for stylistic effect). For the cover art, I used a picture of myself as a baby (this is something multiple artists, such as Zayn and Lil Wayne have done).
For the third album, I used a picture of Humayun and distorted it using the “Polar Coordinates” function in Photoshop. I named it “Telepsychotropic”, as the first word that came to mind was “psychotropic”, and attaching “tele” to it made it seem more futuristic.
And finally, we come to the album at hand, the self-titled fourth album.
In the News section, I devised a series of fake news stories, based on news stories found on the websites researched. The first story dealt with a Grammy nomination. I took a screenshot of the Grammy website listing the nominees, and edited it using the Inspect Element feature of Google Chrome to list “Otherside” as a nominee, and Humayun Babar as a credited songwriter (that would be Elan’s real name).
The second story dealt with the release of the free song found on the website (“Great White Gravity”).
And finally, the third story dealt with the announcement of tour dates.
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This concludes the post by Abdullah and with nothing further to add, this is the webstie for ELAN.
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