Daily UI 003
The prompt: Design a landing page. It can be for a book, an album, a mobile app, a product, etc.
My approach: I’ve said in my other articles that my primary focus for these Daily UI challenges is pushing myself to create eye-catching designs. I’m wanting to push my personal envelope and test the boundaries of designing things that might incorporate techniques I haven’t tried before or want to explore further.
For this challenge I knew fairly quickly that I wanted to design a landing page for the band The Black Keys as if they had just released the album Chulahoma. I have been a fan of this album art for years and creating a landing page inspired by it sounded awesome.
I love this artwork, and I feel like it goes so well with the music for this album. In designing a landing page for The Black Keys with it, my next step was to look at their current landing page to help me gauge the necessary components a band might need.
It looks fairly straightforward and not far off from what I was hoping to do for my design. I wanted the landing page to have prominent visuals and focus primarily on creating a feeling in the viewer. I felt that the primary purposes for a band’s landing page are to sell tickets to shows, to promote their albums, and to promote the feeling and aura of the band.
As I mentioned I wanted to let the artwork be prominent. Therefore, this challenge ended up being primarily an exercise in practicing my Photoshop skills. I found the poster below thankfully, which provided more consistent colors and already connected the front and back of the album cover. Additionally, it had a beautiful rendering of “The Black Keys” name in the style of the artwork.
Using this image, I worked in Photoshop to remove the background. I then worked to complete the colorful smoke curls that had been cut off. I recombined the elements from the poster with the key components of the landing page and arrived with the design below.
I worked for a bit in Principle to animate some features of this landing page. It was straightforward to make the record spin, which I liked. It was also straightforward to make the smoke grow and move as one unit. However, I felt that to really do justice to the artwork at least some of the smoke tendrils should grow and move independently. I have a passion for animation so I’d love to practice and learn to animate those tendrils individually. I’ll have to defer that to a later week, however.
To finish, I made a blurred background in Photoshop to showcase my design on Dribble and Instagram and show the Daily UI challenge numbers.
