Aerial Design

Some people say that Myspace is a dying network, crippled by the onslaught of social networking empires such as Facebook and Twitter. And I guess it is in some respects, but when it comes to music, that belief is very much a naïve one! Apart from playing host to over 8 million artists, TechCrunch explains that “Traffic to MySpace’s music subdomain, has grown 190% since its launch in September 2008 and year-over-year traffic to the URL has increased a staggering 1017%. This increase in traffic equals with a growth from 4.2 million unique visitors to 12.1 million in June 2009.”

…And that’s why we keep designing them.

The guys from Six Time Champion came to us and asked us to create a really ‘professional’ looking Myspace layout–like we would do anything else? Their music flows from the same vein as bands like A Day To Remember, and Set Your Goals. I would say it’s best described as hardcore-pop. They wanted an aesthetic that fit inside a serious looking shell, screaming “don’t take us too serious!”. Easy right?

We ended up throwing quite a lot into this project, the boys left with a sweet layout and a total re-brand! We even made them a crest:

They asked for a lot of purple, but not too much. And we agreed. Covering the page with purple would create a more childish atmosphere and they were keen to keep a slightly grittier image. So we decided to make purple the accent colour to a mainly black and white palette. It worked out pretty well and we ended up with a good balance. To maintain some consistency with the crest, we placed some of its elements up and down the page, giving the player box wings was my personal favourite.

One of the the things that helps a layout look a lot more professional are status changes. Rollover links are not hard to set up, and omitting them would be a mistake. Their presence lifts a page out of the depths of the amateur and into the heights of “Hey, check this out!”. After all, there is something so satisfying about links that subtly change when you hover over them. While i feel these elements are important, what’s even more important is doing them correctly. It’s horrible when you see the image outline because the artist has failed to render the images correctly for the web. When you next see it you’ll know and remember this moment.

Once it was all coded and placed, accommodating any inter-browser compatibility issues, we could finally show it off to the world. Except that the bassist never got round to signing up to Twitter so he has no widget… for now! But seriously, we love these lads and they loved their new sexy web presence.

Go check out the Myspace page or click on the image below to see all the detail!