This was a tricky thing to choose. The event upon which to design the site is important. I really I wasted to find something I was interested in as then I wouldn't have to worry about the content or anything like that. If I chose an event I was familiar with then the content and enthusiasm would come naturally and all I would have to concern myself with would be the plugins and functionality of the site. Of course this is a luxury that probably wouldn't be afforded to me in the real world working environment but I thought, whilst I have the chance to choose, I might as well go with something I'd enjoy.
So I thought about my biggest passions. Film, Music and Design. I exhaustively looked around at the major festivals and events within each of these fields. There were loads of obvious choices such as Glastonbury Festival, Reading Festival, Reasons to be Creative, OFFF, etc. I wanted to try and avoid any of those and look for something smaller and more obscure. However, I wanted to make sure that it still had a decent amount of content and notoriety with a brand to go from. With all that in mind, I could create a shortlist:
Film:
Cannes Film Festival:
Cannes is a world famous film festival that allows films to be submitted and screened before release. It is viewed by an esteemed audience and awarded the prestigious "Cannes Official Selection" title. This carries weight in the industry and has the power to propel a director or actor to new heights and notoriety.
The website itself is very nicely styled. It is elegant and sleek. Modern yet classic. The typography and colour choice are very simplistic and sophisticated. The black on white/gold colour scheme almost has a regal tone to it. The festival has a red carpet and is very highly regarded so the colour scheme and font choices really tie all the together very successfully.
Sundance Film Festival:
Sundance is a slightly smaller film festival. It still carries weight in the industry and attracts a lot of attention and notoriety however, it is slightly more low key and informal. As a result the website has an entirely different tone. It is a much more modern and informal looking site. It is more inviting I feel and it has a more friendly and welcoming feel. The sans-serif fonts harken back to swedish design with everything left-aligned. There are more informal headlines and a more chatty way of speaking.
All in all I think I would prefer to create a site for this festival over creating one for Cannes. Cannes website is already perfectly designed and doesn't really suit a different style due to the importance and sophistication of the event. Sundance on the other hand is more open ended and has more avenues to explore. The logo is quite broad and can suit a few different styles of doing things. A flat designed site for example. It is more exciting to me and a firm contender.
Design:
Half Rez:
Source: http://halfrez.com
Half Rez is a small and new design festival held in Chicago by a small group of people. It is a conference for people from various design orientated backgrounds. It is for both 2D and 3D artists and animators. It is a chance to meet other like-minded people in the industry and learn some tricks of the trade/just generally hang out. It is a really informal and small conference that is informal and friendly to a high degree. This makes it a really fun project to design a site for. I love the logo and the overall tone to the event. It is an awesome idea and a really informal way of doing something like this. I can imagine how to create an engaging site around the idea.
The one thing here is that it might be too small to incorporate all of the different elements this project requires. There are a lot of quite specific elements we need to place into our sites and I don't think this event really has facilities for them in such a way as not to shoe horn them in. We will have to see.
Music:
National Association of Music Merchants:
Source: http://www.namm.org
The NAMM show is probably the largest musical convention in the world. It is held in America and showcases musical instruments from all areas. It is a great place for smaller companies to market themselves to the general public and brands of all sizes to showcase their latest products.
As you can see however, the website is fairly shocking. It is very poorly designed. This is the actual show page:
It looks as though very little thought has gone into colour schemes, composition and typography. It is very poorly styled and not very engaging at all. In fact at first I thought I'd found the wrong site. It really is poor and not really even very functional or user friendly. I think that this would be a really good site to create in this project as the website is very poorly designed and I could do quite a lot to make it more accessible and more aesthetically pleasing.
Conclusion:
These are all potential candidates with pros and cons. I think that I am going to dismiss Cannes immediately however, because I cannot really see a feasible way to drastically improve the site they already have. It would be all to easy to just reproduce what they already have. I think the other ones have more potential and excite me more. Particularly Sundance and NAMM.
At the moment I am leaning marginally more towards the NAMM show to create my site for however, I will consider my options more over the next few days and see how I feel after more time to weigh up the pros and cons.
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