Website Redesign – Trip Device

Project summary

Tasks: Web Design
Client: Trip Device

Overview

Trip Device originally requested a website that can easily be updated. With a growing number of fans and the need to attract more audiences, it quickly became apparent that the band needed to upgrade the look and feel of its website. The music of Trip Device is powerful, evocative, and modern. The beats, melodies, and lyrics are catchy, all set against a backdrop of fat modern rock sound with a hint of electronic tracks.

The challenge

These guys are rockstars. Unfortunately, their original site did not quite give their music or image much justice. From the start, the original site, built entirely in Flash, was not easy to update, was slow to load, and cannot easily be indexed by search engines. The dated style and inconsistent use of fonts did little justice to the group’s evocative and compelling music. There seems to be no coherent theme / style.

Results

I wanted to keep their image/branding consistent so I took some style/colors from their logo, an orange mushroom set against a dark background. I let their music / image / lyrics drive this site. There’s a lot of angst and sullen theme in their music and I represented that with torn edges, destroyed/eroded look, paint splatters, powerful images, darker colors, etc. However, there’s also some semblance of order represented by clean cut lines, open white spaces, clean simple text, etc.

Right off the bat, an animated flash billboard on the landing page grabs the audience’s attention with constantly changing, jittery/animated/ flashing or scrolling images. I also took key snippets from their lyrics and made it slowly appear/scroll randomly on top of the main image. I also tried to find a good balance of flash and css/html. Not only will it will make some of the pages load faster and the text more search engine friendly, it’ll make it easier to update later on.