Bryan and I have been friends since childhood. We are both musicians and have played in many bands together. Bryan needed a website that would showcase his upcoming YouTube series. The following is a description of the series taken from its YouTube channel.
A French documentary crew follows acclaimed Swed-ish Super Producer VÄÄMM (James Austin Johnson) into his world of creative chaos, musical madness, and fire beats.
The series production credits include many close friends of mine. One person I have not met, James Austin Johnson, is currently a cast member on the legendary late show, Saturday Night Live.
What was the goal of the page?
Many people and organizations use a ‘link tree’ in place of their website address on social media profiles like Instagram. Bryan wanted to make a more impressive-looking ‘link tree like’ page with a similar vibe to a site done by Kanye West for his product, the StemPlayer.
What made this page cool?
While I love WordPress, this site offered a unique situation where I could create a web page from scratch. While this was the only means of making a website in the 90s and early 2000s, it’s seldom a consideration for modern website production. I love the direct approach to creating something 100% from code, so I took on this project.
Sites made from scratch are much faster than sites that pull from a more extensive library like WordPress, which is usually quicker than sites made with WIX, Squarespace, and the like. Because the site is faster, it can more practically utilize video or more considerable filesize assets that would generally be impractical for website use.
The site also had a very unique and distinguishable look and feel. Ultimately, it turned out to be quite different from the site it was initially inspired. The site uses a MP4 video that loops. The video was made by a 3D artist whom currently works at Disney.
Ultimately, Bryan decided to use a traditional link tree because it was too difficult for him to keep the site I made updated, as he often needed to change the links. With his permission, I kept the site on my GitHub profile with the hope of inspiring others to do more out-of-the-box web development. Hopefully, he will still get some traffic and exposure for his music in exchange.