Having looked through the various single page websites, the one that caught my eye and interested me the most was “2018 in Music”. What got my attention to the website was actually it’s simplicity. The site’s main purpose is to display and show off the albums that made 2018 a great year for music.
When you enter the site, the first thing you will see in big, bold font is the title of the website “2018 in Music”. Written in black text with a plain white background it’s not much to look at. From there, the only way to scroll through to from let to right. To which it is simply looking at the albums and listening to a simple track provided. It’s the attention to each popular album individually that makes this website stand out. Not how many visual bells and whistles there is to see as you scroll though. The main purpose of this website is to display the music and album covers that have been made for each album and that’s it.
Once you find an album that you like or seems interesting to you, you can click on it and the page will shift to a new display. This new display will show only that album, along with a quote, a short description, and provide a video clip of one song from the album, now with the webpage moving from top to bottom. That’s pretty much all there is to the website, simple and clean. The only thing else is at the end of the webpage where you can find the authors credits and link to their personal page.
So as I’ve stated, what I like and what makes this single web page work, is its simplicity. The purpose of it and reason why it was created was to show of some of the popular albums there were in 2018. I can see if this was about almost any other topic, there would need to be a serious overhaul in design and visual interaction. However, because this is about music and the album art that accompanies it, I feel that the simplicity helps to bring the viewers focus to each individual piece. Similar to art in an art gallery, this website is a simple white background in which multiple different albums with their artwork is spread across. Any little color, shape, or intricate effect would take the attention away from that and the website would lose its intended purpose.
With this perspective in mind, there are a few changes or addition I would make to the website, mostly when you select an album to view. Once an album is selected there is only the before mentioned details that are shown. With only one album being seen, that could be when more of a design aspect comes into play. Shapes, colors, patterns, and other visuals effects could work with the album cover to turn each display into its own “piece”. Perhaps the background could change color to compliment the color(s) in the album. Another thing could be that various shapes in different patterns could appears that could go along with the style of music. If the genre is something like heavy metal or rap then the shapes could be more geometric and hard. If it’s like jazz or funk then there could be freeform and smooth shapes. One other minor issue I had with the site was its horizontal scrolling. Not a major problem by any means, but I noticed that the scroll wheel on a mouse is much less response when horizontal scrolling versus vertical scrolling. There’s not much I can think of to improve it except to make the page scroll vertically, thought having the page move horizontally is something that makes it unique. Though there is a scroll bar provided to solve any issue (but what fun is that?)
Overall, I think “2018 in Music” is a great single page website. Maybe not super creative by any means, but it does do a great job in letting the albums speak for themselves. Of course it could use a few design elements here and there and perhaps a slightly better way to scroll though. However, if this website is an example of one thing, it goes to show that sometimes a simple design can work just as well, if not better, than something so complex.