Interactivity Justification

For this project I intend on making a music website which will be used to inspire users and also doubles as a microblogging site in which I can engage with my audience.  I plan on adding a few interactive features, mostly including embedded videos from YouTube but also having a comment section in which people can come into contact with me by adding in their name and then have a comment section to ask any questions of give any feedback. Moreover, the videos serve the purpose of educating and also inspiring users, and possibly some entertainment can come from listening to music and watching videos.

For my images most of the ones in my website will actually be illustrations made my myself in Photoshop or perhaps some will be photos of myself edited. However I will also be sourcing some images or videos from Pexels as those are royalty free, also there is younger photos of myself from the internet however as they are of me I believe I should be okay to use them. The reason I have chose to do my own illustrations and edits is to promote my identity and brand, as I am trying to advertise myself to be more creative and abstract, so all the images and content have to follow that idea. 

Videos

The links I chose are as follows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdiuSnoFBh0

Producer - Blanks 

This video I have previously seen and I am quite familiar with, this content is client friendly and acts almost as a tutorial for people as it goes through the process of making a song, and since it is in the pop genre, it is a longer video too so it will contrast with shorter videos, and it will also keep audience on my site for as long as possible

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM3D6goCCWk

Producer - Karra

This video is a very in depth tutorial video which has a great runtime and goes into plenty of depth and shows how the music is created and also gives advice as to what is good and what works for them. Moreover, it also matches the theme as it is relevant content and it keeps people hooked onto my website as even though I do not take ownership nor do I get any credit from it, however it keeps audiences hooked to my website and doesn't necessarily deter them from my website.

The following links are all of people drumming as this matches my identity and theme of being a drummer , moreover it also adds plenty of interactive content to make them feel for engaged with the website. It also is a great way for to hook people in as some of the people in the videos are easy to recognise so this use of endorsement will hopefully attract a larger audience. It could possibly also make the website more efficient for helping people learn and boost their skills, this is as not all audiences are the same, so some absorb information in a different way, so adding a way to learn audibly, so this will make this is more accessible to audiences who have struggle reading or are possibly blind or have impaired vision .

Contact Us

This section demonstrates another level of interactivity to my website as it allows user to directly interact with me through that page, it allows me to engage with my audience on a more personal level as it a direct message. This may help with retaining customers as it invites users to speak freely which they will appreciate as they feel they have freedom and they can actively have a voice and opinion.

Illustrations and Edits

This image here was one taken from Pexels as it is royalty free and is free to the public domain, when I saw it first, it was a fully coloured image however I wanted to make this piece unique and have a really nice atmosphere created from it, so I initially lowered the saturation so that it was black and white.

I achieved this effect by using the sponge tool which has the purpose of lowering the colour intensity (saturation) of an image, so I used it to remove the colour. But after I wasn't quite happy with the image lacking all of it's colour, so I decided to restore colour to make a focal point, in the centre of the image was the snare drum and a small part of the hi-hat so I decided this was my focal point, so I placed a new layer on top with the same image in colour, then masked the black and white image with this one and painted the colour into the scene.

To add dramatic effect and motion to my scene I used the burn tool to remove anything in the background then with varying opacities I used the dodge tool with a large brush size to create the effect of smoke, this was to bring my image to life by creating static motion as smoke usually flows and slowly fades.

For the rest of my illustrations I want to do them all freely with a pen tool, only using images as inspiration and references. For the EDM , my main background and the pop page I want some form of silhouette of a person engaged with music, this is to reflect how the users were engaging with music through the use of my site.

 I enjoy gradients too as they seem to match my theme and I have seen them used by other musicians so I will use the gradient tool much more than the paint bucket tool. I also may want to create depth in my pieces, possibly by making an outline or a form of glowing effect, so I would utilize the gaussian blur to make it blend into the background, I would do this process over a series of layers, each with the spread being over different distances with the original placed on top of all the layers. 

Image Optimization

After research I realized that my selected images were quite large in their file sizes, so this meant including them in my website would make it load much slower than normal, this isn't ideal for a professional website as it isn't appealing to customers as they want the fastest service possible, so I had to find a way to lower the file size. 

Most standard images start around 2MB in size, this is far too big as I have found that most of the images in websites are below 300KB in size so I will aim to do the same to ensure that loading speeds are as fast as possible. 

Fonts

DIN Next Light

I found this font to be quite modern as the letters are quite round, so I plan to use this for the majority of my websites text, I believe it should be relatively easy to read and understand and it also matched my website's modernist theme

Lulo Clean

This font seemed quite bold, I enjoy the striking appearance it has and how it demands attention, i think that I could use this on my website on the genre pages, as I want that section to stand out in my website

Georgia

This font is more of a traditional and older than my other fonts and I could see this being used in the place of titles as it looks more formal so perhaps for the 'Top Recommendations' section I think that this may be suitable.