Vermeil cargo, crenellated fans
Most band sites are a gratuitious mash of Flash menus, pop-up windows, and vacuous html splash pages. So it was with trepidation that I approached a new project, a band site, this summer. When my friend Andrew Ewell and I began talking about a new site for American Dumpster, though, he impressed upon me that this band goes its own way: a welding happy frontman, a vixen on the washboard, a loyal multigenerational local fan base. Indeed. Andrew’s not too bad on the dobro either.
The new American Dumpster site works to knit fans local and not together with a PPHBB forum and a Flash image gallery that respects the band photographers’ licensing wishes. Soon we’ll take advantage of Dreamhost’s free QT streaming for the band .mov about the making of their new album “Rumor Mill”; the entire site runs on Wordpress for easier maintenance. I also added Fabricio Zuardi’s XSPF player, which is a great use of unobtrusive flash and the new xspf playlist language; his extended slim player requires only 15 pixels of vertical space which any designer can begrudge for the added functionality.
The imagery for this site was tricky since the band name and motto (”The Rusted Fender of the American Dream”) invites kitschy details. I focused on the rust and felt compelled to add a dumpster at the bottom of pages. Coordinating album graphics compose the header around the nameplate and the page background.
Back from a late summer hiatus, American Dumpster is keeping a full fall schedule and playing a show at Starr Hill tonight. Who knows what the rumor mill will churn up next?
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Posted Friday, October 6th, 2006, 7:50 am | Filed in Design. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
