Website Redesign for Music Composer

Kyan Laslett is a commercial composer working primarily in the TV and film industries. His website provides a portfolio of his work across various platforms.

Kyan came to me because his website had three issues. The design was overly fussy, it did not work across all devices, and although it had a content management system, that system was too complicated for for a non-developer to use (which pretty much invalidates the whole point of having a CMS in the first place).<

Simplifying the visual appearance of the site made the remaining tasks easier. Minimal layouts are desirable in and of themselves. However, they also naturally lend themselves to responsive adaptation.

Each page eventually consisted of a mosaic of tiles representing Kyan's work through the years. On PCs and laptops the accompanying text would appear when the user rolled over each image. However, on tablets and phones (where there is no rollover state), the text appeared permanently underneath the images.

The CMS was tricky because the client needed to use a number of different external hosts for his Portfolio samples, Youtube, Vimeo and SoundCloud. Other posts only required still images and text. The CMS had to handle all of these smoothly while the design had to incorporate the different media seamlessly.