The Rick Whitehead Jazz Trio site is now live! Rick and Sanelma (the trio’s publicist) were absolutely fabulous to work with - which I attribute partially to their own capacities as creative individuals.
Design
The design process began with photographs of the trio taken by Michael Stewart. The images are striking in their equal display of energy and mystery. The color palate and tone of the site grew naturally out of this theme.
Excited by the opportunity to do a website for a jazz guitarist (I’ve been known to noodle a bit myself), I put on one of my favorite jazz albums, Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack to the film Taxi Driver, and went to work. Whether consciously, or subconsciously, the green tones and the cityscape are hauntingly reminiscent of the camera work in the film Taxi Driver.
The green colors serve the mood of the site because they have both a harmony and tension with each other, which was an intentional nod to jazz itself. The orange brings a unity between these colors and the background pattern of the main photographs, and also helps warm up the page ever so slightly. The cityscape image, taken by flickr member wrc, is the city of Rosslyn, VA, just across the Potomac from D.C. This adds a personal touch to the page as Rick is himself a resident of nearby Alexandria, VA. In a desire to be hospitable to the variety of visitors coming to the site, I chose to structure the site in a fairly straightforward blog approach.
Function
The site runs on the open source wordpress blogging cms. In addition, I’ve also added the official comments plugin and the random quotes plugin. The wordpress implementation is fairly straightforward, two exceptions being custom page templates for each section and some header tweaking to produce the navigation visual elements.
Lastly, like any well made website, the xhtml and css code validates and also passes all three levels of Section 508 automated validation. (and may I also add that the xhtml is pure semantic utopia!)
View the Rick Whitehead Jazz Trio’s site at: www.rickwhiteheadguitar.com
It looks really nice, man. I’m impressed.
Nice job. (though the last half of the blog with all that computer mumbo jumbo sounds confusing.) but nice job.