PIXEL MAVERICK

I love music.

I love beautiful web design.

I love discovering something great while it is still relatively unknown to most of the world — still obscure, hungry and pure.

It is because of these three great loves that I find the indie music site TheSixtyOne so amazing.  I originally heard about TheSixtyOne from a TechCrunch article and was blown away.

Here is a quick review of some of the best features of this site.

The Interface - The interface is beautiful in it’s simplicity.  The band has the ability to upload a picture that best represents them while their song is playing and that pic spreads the entire span of the browser.

Band Info - The information about the band appears in small partially transparent overlays that pop up throughout the song.  If you want to know the full info on the band you can click it, if you don’t you still learn some factoids about the band without interfering with the primary experience.

The Navigation - The navigation is minimal to keep from intruding on the main experience, but simple and intuitive so the user figures out how things work within a few seconds of interaction with the interface.  The “Info” overlays are clickable, and you explore bands by using the large Prev/Next arrows on the sides of the browser.  The main navigation is unobtrusive at the top right & the Action tools (Share, Fav, Download) are accessible from the toolkit lockup on the left side of the browser.

Additional Band Content - In addition to being able to write band info that appears in the previously mentioned overlays, the bands are able to upload additional content (Images, etc) that appear occasionally much like the info overlays.

The Variety - TheSixtyOne features bands that span all areas of music from SoCal to Folk.

“Wattup …braaaahhhhh?”

“Sometimes we just play concerts alone in the woods for the trees”

“One of these Sons of William is not like the others”

If you want more content and connection from TheSixtyOne you can also check out their Facebook Page or their blog, although from the dates on the posts for both of those it does not seem like they are very active.

TheSixtyOne is not a replacement for iTunes or Pandora.  You need those music options for on demand & preferred channel listening, but TheSixtyOne is definitely a beautiful vacation from those options when you want to find something new.

Hopefully the owners of TheSixtyOne will keep to their core offering and we never see them sellout and veer from that simple brilliance by adding stupid content like the crap that MTV spews these days.

I hope this review is helpful to any music lovers, and that more people and enjoy TheSixtyOne as much as I do.

According to RRW we are within 5 years of having the cool tricks of Minority Report right in our own living rooms.

You know which scene I am talking about.  Tom Cruise is flipping and waving all sorts of holographic folders around the room to navigate through a complex system & get the data he needs.

According to one of my favorite blogs, Read Write Web, I will be able to flip important data folders all over my living room before I am 40.  Hell Yes!! To back up their claim they showed this badass video of a company called Oblong Industries showing some of the gestural interface tricks they have already developed.  Since this video is already 1 year old I am guessing they have even cooler stuff today.

I just want to make sure that between big arm swooshes & wrist flips of highly sensitive work data from my lounge chair …that I don’t have bulky Nerd Mittens on leaving me unable to nimbly navigate a Smartphone or a bag of Cheetos.

I will take the cool half-gloves that Tom had and we will be all good thank you very much.

Last Friday David Vogeleer (Flash guru extraordinaire here at The Martin Agency) showed some of us a very cool site called Xtra Normal.  It allows non-developers like myself with the tools to put together a short animation skit with no real skills necessary other than being able to type and having an imagination.

That does not mean you can make good content.  Most likely it will suck.  But it is very simple, and a blast to do.  I hope you enjoy my first film released to the public….not bad for 30 minutes and one too many mornings watching Handy Manny with my son.

After much searching, and trial and error of very minor edits to the template design…I have successfully launched a redesign to my blog.  I do not know the guy, but big thanks to Derek Punsalan of 5thirtyone for designing such a great WordPress theme.  The theme cam ready to accept several widgets and plugins as you can see by the wonderful display of them in the two columns on the right side (…too much?).  I think it works for me…clean, simple, and a great layout that allows me to arrange the hierarchy of information that I want.

Now I have no other procrastination and must resume posting.

I came across this interactive video experience on YouTube this morning via a link from Experience Manifesto blog (a great blog to follow if you don’t already).  As this is the first time I have ever seen a video that prompts you to interact with it, I applaud YouTube (or whoever did this) for the idea of engaging the audience in a deeper experience with the video.

Essentially the normal video (in this case the somewhat annoying but catchy song by Lady Gaga… po po po po po po poker face….ughh dammit now it is stuck in my head) runs, but there is a simple recall quiz embedded into the video that the user can play with.  If you like those types of recall games, then this is definitely a tool that will engage the user in a deeper experience with the video and therefore with the brand.  So, excellent concept on that level.

Where this misses the mark a little bit is on the user experience.  From what I can tell, once the user answers a question the original video is lost and you are automatically switched to another video that has its own recall quiz embedded.  This switch is automatic and the user has no control over it which misses the point entirely.  The user came to the site to watch the video and YouTube enhanced the experience by adding in a recall game….but then kills the experience by taking the user away from the video they wanted to watch in the first place.  Whoops.

**Well, I just found another bad idea with this concept when I tried to post this blog post.  As you can see if you tried to click on the embedded video…I tried to embed the YouTube video in my blog post and it would not let me by request of the original video poster on YouTube.  Why on earth would you NOT want to allow your video to be embedded and distributed beyond the confines of the YouTube site?  Whoops + Dumb!!! Click here to see the video.