David Emery Online

Morisset has worked with designer Caroline Robert to create a digital artwork that appears when the album is played on mp3 players like the iPod or iPhone. The work deliberately echoes the pleasures of old vinyl record sleeves, where the song lyrics were often written out in full. Each track on the album has an individual image that appears on the iPod screen when it is played, with the lyrics of the song then appearing on the screen as they are sung.

Well this is very clever – you’ve been able to embed time-specific artwork in AAC tracks for ever (and is used a lot in podcasts) but I’ve never seen anyone do anything interesting with it before.

...But actually this is one of the most forward-looking electro-guitar pop albums of the year (by turns it mixes Atari Teenage Riot with MIA, the Mary Chain and industrial hip-hop beats). It seems to constantly push you to the edge of your senses and then reels you back in. It wants to give you a headache and then sooth your brow.

I love the Sleigh Bells album – got to be not only the best debut of the year so far but one of the best albums of 2010 full stop.

I hated the media-creep of iTunes from the start. A dedicated ‘QuickTime Video Library’ would’ve been my preferred solution for Movies and TV shows, a rebuild of iSync to handle MobileMe and iPhone synchronization settings, and a standalone iTunes Store app (or, frankly, web site) for media purchases.

I have a real love/hate relationship with iTunes; I love the fact it has all my music in, and the power of smart playlists and the useful features it’s accumulated over the years, but simultaneously rue the fact it’s undoubtably the worst designed application Apple have.

I think it’s quite interesting that on iOS the functions iTunes does on the Mac are split out into 3 different apps (or 4 on the iPod/iPad with the Movies app) – “iPod” for media playback and organisation, “iTunes” for purchasing media and “App Store” for apps. I’d quite like to see something similar on the desktop, with the Finder handling syncing devices (don’t really need a separate app for that I don’t think).

A couple of weeks back – it’s been a little too busy recently to keep up with blogging, as you may have noticed – at work we launched a new site for Vampire Weekend:

vampireweekend.com

I’m happy with the way it’s turned out, which is fortunate as it’s liable to be the last artist site I do for a good while. Such is the way these things go I’m now no longer in the position where I do any actual design or development anymore. Not to say I’m not involved with all that – I certainly am – but the pixels are no longer pushed by my own hand. I’m sure I’ll keep on doing the odd job on the side (I’m not just going to stop designing, perish the thought) but certainly I’ll be doing it a lot less. Hopefully that doesn’t mean I’ll start redesigning this place even more though…

With vampireweekend.com being my swan song then, I thought I should try and make it a good one.

My favourite element is the homepage with it’s fullscreen scroll-y carousel, and particularly the ‘Contra’ page within it, which you can drag around like a google map to reveal the lyrics to all the songs, and listen to them as well. That whole home page section is hopefully enhanced by being fully fluid, so each of the different featured bits of content you can flip through all size themselves to fit the browser fullscreen (including the headings on the Contra page, which is super complicated considering you can then drag it around).

Other things of note include the gig listings, which use Flickr machine tags so that you can make your photos of a gig that you’ve posted onto Flickr appear on the site and the photos page which similarly pulls in from the bands Flickr group. Also, I’m quite proud of the article pages which all line up to a baseline grid (if you’re in the right browser – it’s not exactly the same in all of them… as no site should be) and keep the line lengths all nice and readable as well.

My only real regret is that due to Yahoo!‘s pre-historic webhosting, and the inability for assorted reasons to move to a better host, it has to roll with nasty “?s=news” style URLs instead of nice “/news” ones, which will bug me forever.

URL picky-ness aside, I hope you like it.

Swedish pop star Robyn has launched a 3D video, complete with Twitter integration, for her delightfully titled new track, Don't Fucking Tell Me What To Do...

Pretty nifty, although it’s not the most amazing bit of computer animation I’ve ever seen.

It is though a good signifier of how the music video really has transitioned to being based primarily on the internet, and how it’s changing because of it.