For me making a website is like telling a story.
A story about someone's success, about their aspirations, dreams and ambitions. About the place they want to find themselves in few years. But also about their hard work, sleepless nights and tiredness.
But mainly about someone, because every success has a face. That’s why I love what I do because I have a strong feeling that I help to tell their story. I make their hard work visible, meaningful for other people and for themselves in the same ways.
Process of making a website is a dialogue between my world and my vision and somebody else’s. We both learn from each other. After each such cooperation, my eyes are opening up more and more to new things invisible to me before.Thanks to this, I hope that our final product, which is a website, shows a lot about their history and a bit about mine.
This time I am introducing you to learn story about Michal Nesterowicz - a Polish symphony conductor. Known and respected all over the world, the winner of the Cadaqués Orchestra European Conducting Competition in 2008 and among the prizewinners of the 6th Grzegorz Fitelborg International Conducting Competition in Katowice.
WHAT MICHAL WANTED TO COMMUNICATE BY HIS WEBSITE:
Before I started working on the website’s design I wanted to give myself some pragmatic criteria to understand his expectations and needs and by which to judge the work. I needed to hear his story, to learn his style of communication, taste and sense of humor. To know him well enough to get into his shoes.
In brief we wanted to communicate:
- Smart: This is the communication of the conductor of classical music. He is elegant, good looking man. He has mature listeners to his music.
- Modern: What does it mean ‘modern’ in this case? Easy: to find the most important information: when and where is a certain concert? How can I buy a ticket? How can I listen to the music? Intuitive and in form adapting to the recent trends in the world of web design
- Transparent and legible: For People in all ages. Classical music is this kind of music which connects generations. It is not a music for everybody, rather the audience has a sophisticated musical taste and high quality requirements.
- Delicate reference to music
FIRST PROPOSAL:
6 subpages: Bio, Concerts, News, Photos, Media, Contact. Media included videos and audios.
In terms of communications:
- Smart : I chose five colors to the palette: expressive black, white, grey, subtle elements in red and dirty gold.
- Modern: sharp font, uppercase letters, icons instead of text, scrolled page. Everywhere options for switching things on and off up to user’s taste. For instance music on the Bio subpage. It was challenging to design website intuitive and adapting to the recent trends at the same time. During preparation I was looking for inspiration on www.awwwards.com where best looking websites are nominated and judged. All of them are amazing, challenging and astonishing but mostly not intuitive. Intuitive: described buttons/ icons for instance menu.
- Transparent and legible: that's why I used interlaced colors to distinguish the screens: two expressive colors, black and white, and a lot of gray. To emphasize the most important information like the date I used gold and red. I was afraid of using so wide palette of colors just for the website, but it makes it much more readable.
- Delicate reference to music: the menu icon is designed like sliders on a music console, going to the next page using the sign of harmony, clef instead of page numbers
CONCLUSION:
Thanks to this work together I understood what ‘modern’ means for Michal - simple in form adapting to the recent trends but nothing surprising, acting in an unconventional way. Everything on the website must be clear and easy to find and interact with. No unconventionals colors, everything should be readable, nothing that you need to think what exactly it is, or how to open it. Effects should be applied on click, rather than mouse hover, or both. I think that it’s a classic style rather than ‘modern’.
Actions:
- Classical menu
- Dropped the gold color - not visible enough
- Reorganise calendar - not clear enough, too tricky.
- Dropped the icons referencing music and with music in background - It can be confusing and make people get lost on the website.
SECOND PROPOSAL
I kept the design style, and I proposed some changes according to our previous discussion.
This time despite some changes, I added new section archive of news. I wanted them to look like a musical or theatrical program. I designed two sections for news archive, one before open, second after click on specific news item.
CONCLUSION
We were afraid that in the new news archive design sometimes there could be not enough space for longer description. As well it could be hard to take a look for old news, because the database of news in the archive was very large.
So it was challenging to design news archive for a lot of news organized in the way that you can find a specific one quickly and easily. In addition to design a lot of space for a long description.
So I was working on news archive sections from scratch to design something completely different than I’ve done before.
THIRD PROPOSAL
This one is really close to the final version. There weren’t any further huge changes.
I am learning React so I decided to make this website in React. Which finally I feel that it was a great decision. Right now this website has a big potential to be expanded even in the direction that I can’t predict.
Enjoy www.michalnesterowicz.com