This is always something that bugged me. Regardless of what you think of Youtube, it’s the most widely used video sharing site and it’s here to stay. I personally like other video sites for their nicer visual player, but many people enjoy Youtube’s. I personally think it’s a little bulky, but it is easy to use. However, the design leaves something to be desired, so I tried my hand at updating it.
I kept the same size and overall look. I merely updated it to be more consistent, cleaner and crisper. It provides a nicer overall design that most people won’t find agitating to have within their clear websites. Most notable are the toned-down background and simpler slider. Here is a side-by-side comparison, with my updated bar on top:
This could be accomplished by Youtube easily with some small updates to their glyphs. A little bit goes a long way.
A month or so ago I made a post about Favtape and discussed other music websites, like its ancestor Muxtape. Well I’m pleased to announce my new favorite music site: Grooveshark. Grooveshark is a flash-based web application that works very much like an ipod…someone elses ipod that has 5 million songs uploaded. It has a similar look and feel as an itunes/ipod mashup, with it’s own unique styling. And as an interface designer/developer I have to say I’m in love with the design. Very sleek, smooth, and crisp design that is easy to navigate and use. The best part about it? It’s extremely fast for a Flash site. I’m not sure how they managed that but the animations and everything are very smooth.
Grooveshark also has an Autoplay feature, which makes it basically a new (more stylish) Pandora. And unlike Pandora, Grooveshark allows you to add (via drag&drop no less) songs into the playlist wherever you’d like. You can vote yay or nay on whatever song you want to come out with a good playlist. They also have a social network of sorts where you can favorite tracks and see others playlists and save and share playlists and songs…etc. I’m not sure if I’ll use this feature but I’m sure plenty of others will. Also, the advertising is out of your way and unobtrusive…awesome.
Something I think they need to add is more links for artists. There should be a link to the artist’s homepage, their amazon page (maybe a buy this cd button), maybe a link to their itunes, and also their last.fm page. Also the lyrics of the song would be a fun tool. And speaking of last.fm, it would be great (read: probably won’t happen) if the tracks you listen to could be scrobbled to your last.fm.
Grooveshark is still in ‘beta’ but instead they call themselves Grooveshark ‘lite.’ I like it, I think it works. There is a flood of beta apps around and I think it helps establish them better. But even still, the app works perfectly and I highly recommend it. Maybe autoplay your next party?
FFFFOUND! is a site for bookmarking images you find on the web. Images you like, find interesting, inspire you, cool photographs, whatever it may be. Now, what makes it different? It’s streamlined. There’s nothing else the site does…it shows you the image and links back to where you ‘found’ it (always handy to give props to the original), and also shows you similar images you might like to look at. You can literally spend hours just clicking images, then clicking a similar, then a similar, then a similar… It’s invitation-based, signups have been halted a long time ago. I have scoured the web and come up with nothing. I would very much like an invitation please.
On another note, here is another tee that I really like. I must be on a typography kick, although I’ve always been a huge fan. Also, I am enjoying this photography of wrinkled t-shirts (see previous post). It makes for better selling than previous t-shirt stores where you see somebody wearing the tee, or it’s a vector image of a shirt with the graphic slapped on.
Edit: Sorry folks, I never got that FFFFOUND invitation, so stop inquiring! There are a bunch of other clone sites up that do the same thing. My favorite is Dropular.net, although I believe these type of sites have lost their hype.
The Sixty One is a digg-like music website, with a small twist: It plays like an adventure game. You level up and rack up points by bumping (digging) tracks, as well as everything else you can do on the site. It keeps you interacted while you learn some great new music. It’s a pretty nice concept, and actually one I thought of awhile ago (I was going to call it Atomic Radio…guess they beat me to it). Also when you are playing a song, it doesn’t shut off if you navigate elsewhere on the site, which is pretty awesome.
I had heard about the site almost a year ago when it was too new to the scene, and quickly discovered that I found the site unusable. My main problem with the site is the interface and usability. It’s horrendous. Navigating the site and design just hurts my eyes, and nothing grabs my attention properly, and I find it hard to find what I want to click on. The colors are bad, the typography too heavy…and overall its just plain poor design. Granted, the whole site is only run by 2 guys, so I can’t blame them too heavily if they aren’t designers. But the design itself ruined what should have been a fun, engaging experience.
A few of my friends have discovered the site and it’s gaining in popularity, so I decided to check it out again. Since that first time I discovered the site, they had made 0 changes. Probably a lot of backend technical advances, but not design. So, because I needed some practice, I redesigned The Sixty One. I kept true to the colors and general layout, but added enough interface features to completely differentiate between my design and theirs. The new navigation is probably the most useful aspect here, as theirs just didn’t make any sense. Mine slides open sub-navigation instead of splitting it into two lines. Makes a big difference. Oh, and I came up with an idea for a logo, as they currently don’t have one.
I will possibly contact theSixtyOne and see what they say. I like to do a lot of mockup and redesigns for practice, so if you like my style, contact me.
Buy or Don’t Buy is an internet blog run by a few friends of mine. It’s an opinion-based blog, with a strong focus on society, trends, gossip, and the media. Basically they talk about what they love and what they hate, but it makes for fun discussions.
They’ve recently had their official “launch” this past weekend, and to celebrate I redesigned the whole site. The navigation and usability is much easier now with added categories bar and many other features. It’s a Wordpress blog (as well as this blog) and the more I work on it the more comfortable I am with Wordpress. They are so easy to customize!
If you have need for a blog, I love doing them, so get in touch if you do.
Favtape: my new favfriend. This summer a website named Muxtape emerged onto the scene that let you upload music tracks and create your own “internet mixtape” any user could listen to. It (very) quickly become uber popular. A search function appeared and within a few days you were able to find almost any song you wanted to listen to online quickly and easily. And mind you, you DON’T download the track, and there were options for where to buy the track.
However, recently the music industry caught up to its creator and put a stop to the wonderful free service that so many people used and relied on. People kinda felt lost, not wanting to revert back to their old, harder ways of finding music.
Enter Favtape. Favtape picks up where Muxtape left off. It has pretty much all the functionality and a similar look as Muxtape, but it adds more functionality. Now you can create a favtape from your last.fm or pandora loved tracks. Or create a favtape around a specific artist search. Amazing! There is also links now to lyrics and twittering and adding to your tape and much more.
Favtape still needs a good way to search others favtapes, as a big part of Muxtape was seeing other peoples’ music tastes and learning new music through their muxtapes. But what I really love is seeing other developers stepping in for a fallen ally. I hope this becomes a trend…if favtape falls lets see another, and another. As Justin says in his last Muxtape post:
The industry will catch up some day, it pretty much has to. – Justin
The screenshot you see above is actually a styling I did of Favtape. As awesome as it is, the look of the site was slightly off-the-wall and too much pink, so if you’d like my cleaned up version using Stylish if you have Firefox, load it here.
