Composer For Media Seeks Website

Mathazzar Studios is a personal company for independent media composer Marius Masalar — that's me! I specialize in writing high-quality soundtracks for video games and films.

As an emerging composer, marketing is my biggest tool for furthering myself in the industry, and that's where you come in. I'm looking to put up a website to showcase my music and serve as a one-stop landing place for anyone and everyone interested in my work.

For this contest, I need creative designers with a strong artistic sense to put together a homepage and a portfolio page for me. NO CODING. Web 2.0-savvy, professional but eye-catching and memorable. I want something that you, as a designer, would be proud to have in your portfolio.

Mathazzar Studios

Mathazzar Studios is a personal company for independent media composer Marius Masalar — that's me! I specialize in writing high-quality soundtracks for video games and films.

As you've gathered, I'm looking for a website. No coding, just the design itself, so PSDs. Essentially, this site not only needs to represent me, but also needs to stand out from the crowd and give potential employers confidence in my professional abilities, without sacrificing approachability and a certain sense of casualness.

I'm not picky about colours, though I had a fairly dark colour scheme envisioned. Not sombre, but not bright. I'm open to bright colour schemes if you can make it work though, you're the visual artist! One thing I am fairly picky about is typography. I realize that there are technical restrictions with respect to what fonts can be used for body copy, but please try to avoid standard typefaces wherever it is possible. I don't mean use crazy fonts, but stretch your collection a bit, find tasteful and attractive alternatives to the standards — that kind of subtle attention to detail is what I'm all about.

Here's an example of a competitor's site, for reference:

http://www.monarchaudio.com/

What I like is the general layout and colour scheme, with brighter colours used sparingly to highlight focal points. I also like that the portfolio is prominently placed even on the homepage, with a link to the full portfolio — makes sure the work is the focus. The name of the company and its logo is also hard to miss, and that's another bonus. I don't like the excessive Flash use or the fairly standardized template design.

Which brings me to my last point, if a blatantly template-based layout can be avoided without sacrificing ease of interaction or information retrieval, that would be great. If not, that's fine too, just make sure to do something special with the standard layout whether in terms of colour or sizing and placement of elements.

Basically, I would like you to be proud of the design; create something that really shows off your skills in tasteful and professional design work that's creative and effective. I'm an artist too, after all, I know how nice it is to be given some freedom to express a theme as I see fit, so I don't want to hamper you too much as long as it the end result is something that does a fantastic job of marketing my work. :)

And, it goes without saying, if you really impress me with your work, I'll know exactly who to go to for all my future expansion needs and other web projects — and you can remember me the next time you need music or general audio work done for something.

- Homepage & Portfolio page designs, no coding
- Homepage should include latest blog posts and a selection from the Portfolio
- Portfolio should be easy to navigate and make use of an embedded Flash player (just something to consider for the design) to play music and the occasional video sample from various projects
- Tasteful use of non-standard typography, where possible — headings, etc
- Clear, easy-to-navigate layout that's attractive and highlights key information without being annoying or tiring too look at
- I have a soft spot for the kind of art style present in the Samorost, Machinarium, Under One's Wing game series, the posters for some Cirque du Soleil shows (Kooza, for example), Patapon especially, and other vaguely fantasy-grunge, steampunk style examples. Don't feel as though you're required to incorporate these elements, but I mention them in case you find a way to since they're examples of the artistic style that I admire
- Adjectives to describe the site: innovative, creative, intriguing, impressive, memorable, professional, approachable, clever, unique, functional
- To be delivered: layered PSD file(s)

- Blatant overuse of musical elements. Yes, I write music, but I don't want my visitors to choke on treble clefs and eighth notes, it's just tacky and unnecessary. Some musical elements are fine, but don't go overboard
- Cookie-cutter designs make me itchy. Please don't make me itchy. If you can take the design principles that make those standard layouts work and adapt them to reflect your own creative interpretation of me and my work, then you've got exactly what I'm looking for
- Coding. I've got that covered already, so you can just focus on the creative and fun bit: the design!
- Glossy crap. I know Web 2.0 has this tendency to have everything look like it's had a team of munchkins spend a century buffing it, but I can do without the excessive glow and shine to everything. Some reflection and glossiness is fine, but please use it in moderation.