White Bone Rattle – Far Beyond The Settled Mind

Website

I have worked quite closely with the guys from White Bone Rattle in the recent months, designing the album art for their debut single E.P back in August of this year and providing them with a dedicated hosting solution for their presence on the web. The guys recently approached me to design and develop their new website to promote the launch of their forthcoming debut E.P, entitled ‘Far Beyond The Settled Mind’.

The brief was simple, produce a one page website to promote the launch of their forthcoming debut E.P. However they had a lot of content which they wanted to include on this single page. After taking a look at the brief I decided to design a horizontal scrolling single page design, to make the best use of the space available for all of the content they wanted to include. This was a first for me, having never designed a horizontal scrolling site before, and one which I must admit was a real challenge – balancing the usability of the site and making it as cross-browser compatible as possible. I also wanted to include a lot of cutting edge developments in the realms of CSS3 to compliment the design of the site, particularly with regards to the typefaces used.

The design for this project draws heavily on the design of the album artwork produced for ‘Far Beyond The Settled Mind’. I wanted to incorporate the cosmos/universe elements from the album art into the design of the site, but without intruding on the artwork itself – rather simply just complimenting it. The most striking design element for this project is the “planet collision“(credit to Collis, the author of the tutorial) depicting a comet crashing into a planet. This I chose to incorporate into the last section of the site, to mirror the striking artwork depicted in the first section.

For the interaction I turned to my favorite and trusted Javascript framework – jQuery. Utilising a brilliant plugin developed by Ariel Flesler called scrollTo. This enabled me to create the smooth animated scrolling sequence that I wanted to achieve. Ensuring the website was as cross-browser and as user friendly as possible though was another key development consideration I had to give to this project, to ensure that the widest target audience could be achieved.

Lastly, the guys wanted to offer a free track download to help grow their mailing list and generate interest and hype for the release of ‘Far Beyond The Settled Mind’. I provided a database solution to help capture this data, utilising the Zend Framework to handle the db adapter and server side validation.

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