Celia Chavez

Background

Celia Chavez, a talented vocalist and songwriter, wanted a Web site to spotlight her capabilities and publicize her performances, supporting her move from Seattle to New York City.

Navigation and Information Architecture

As a small site, the navigation and information architecture are driven by content type and standard practices for singer/songwriters. The site is structured to answer the expected questions, such as: who is Celia, what does she sound like, what does she look like? The navigation is:

• bio: Short biography of Celia
• songs: Information on Celia’s songs, links to mp3s and pop-up windows with song lyrics
• images: Professional photographs and informal snapshots
• gigs: The main page in this section lists upcoming performances; supporting pages list past performances and venues
• news: Celia’s monthly email newsletter: the main page presents the latest newsletter; supporting pages archive past newsletters
• quotes: Complimentary press
• links: Links to artists Celia admires and other music business professionals
• contact: Celia’s contact information

Content and Editing

Content for Celia’s Web site includes a one-page biography, demo songs, photographs (professional and snapshots), performance information, a newsletter archive, and press quotes.

Celia’s writing requires only the most cursory of copyediting. The primary editing tasks on this site are layout and consistent formatting style.

Basic lyrics information

Embellished lyrics information

In the songs section, for example, Celia wished to present the title, writing and performance credits, lyrics, and an mp3 of each featured song. With seven songs in four projects, the layout needed to be simple, yet a straightforward presentation of the information appeared too stark (see illustration at right).

I included a few lines of lyrics for each song to add human interest as well as some variation to the strictly repetitive structure.

Graphics and Layout

The challenge in designing Celia’s site is that her musical interests—and abilities—span a variety of styles, including jazz, soul, rock, pop, Latin, and electronica. What is consistent throughout her work is warmth and boldness, with a modern touch.

I began the site design with the professional photographs, as these are the best visual images of Celia. The photographer had artistically de-saturated the color images to an almost sepia tone, which dictated the overall color scheme of the site. All images that contribute to the site design, including additional full-color photographs, were converted to gray scale and colorized to the site’s warm gold hue.

For the page headers, Celia selected the bold, readable font from a selection of various styles (examples at right).

For the final design element, I selected a stock photograph of a motion-blurred escalator to use behind the left-hand navigation and as a texture for the header text and horizontal rules which set off the content from the header and footer. While the effect is entirely abstract, for me this image represents Celia’s rising career.

For layout, all content is contained within the vertical space defined by the horizontal rules in the header and footer. This defines the space and keeps line lengths in prose pages from becoming long and difficult to read.

Maintenance

Regular maintenance includes adding and archiving performance information (gigs) and newsletters. New sections are added as content grows. For example, the press quotes were originally featured on the home page, but were moved to their own page in the fall of 2004.

Additional Materials

To support Celia’s professional development, I formatted her resume and testimonials into documents that echo the design of her Web site.

• Submitted resume and testimonial content (pdf)
• Formatted resume (pdf)
• Formatted testimonials (pdf)

Testimonial

“Lorraine has been invaluable in helping me establish my competitiveness in the music industry. She took the time to understand my goals for self-promotion and worked closely with me to tailor my site to my needs. She also has a great way of explaining technical issues that will affect my site's effectiveness, functionality, and navigability. Lorraine responds in a timely fashion whenever I need new photos, sound clips, text updates made to my site. And, she is a joy to work with: her optimistic energy will get you through any frustrations a newcomer to website-building may have. I highly recommend her to anyone needing to establish a unique presence online.”

— Celia Chavez, singer/songwriter