As I found out quite early on in my project, Mogwai's album and track names are completely random and are just things that may have happened to them or makes them laugh. This means that the track names have nothing to do with the music of the track and I couldn't focus any designs around the names as I wanted to focus on just their music also.
After mainly listening to their 5th album, Mr Beast, I found that their music was very uplifting, motivational and inspirational. They hardly include vocals and use a lot of instruments including instruments hooked up to the computer to make more electronic/robotic sounds. Other tracks can be more relaxing and atmospheric and I wanted to include this idea also.
From initial ideas and sketches, I started to think of how the music would look like visually and looked at how the music was gradually building up, whether it was the level of sound or the amount of instruments being used. My sketches looked like line graphs and when I added more tracks to my graph, I noticed that it started to look like a Scottish, hilly landscape and I really liked this idea because Mogwai are a Scottish based band, they include the Scottish countryside in some of their music videos, and when you listen to their music, you can imagine standing in the Scottish countryside looking at all of the scenery. The colour of each graph represents what colours I think of when listening to the music, and it also looks like the cover of each album.
The font that I used for the infographic is Levinim MT. I chose this because I wanted to use a sans-serif typeface that wasn't too bold. I really like the typography used on Mogwai's most recent album "Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will" as I think it suits their style and music, so I wanted to get as close to this as possible.
The graphs are brilliant and despite all the overlapping are still clear. I was slightly confused as to which song was which on the graph as they are only identified through the time. The only thing I would suggest is that maybe you could colour code the song titles to match the graph colours to make it clearer. Or maybe it's just me being slow!! haha!! But great job overall, as it's a very interesting info graphic which engages the user through the depth of the design.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Kyle, this looks great! They layout is very clear and works well, I also think if maybe the songs had been colour coded to match the songs it may have made it slightly better but I think it works really well otherwise.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that it looks lovely and clear, when it could easily have looked rather messy. I think overall it looks very nice, and even though it takes a while to identify each song, the fact you've designed it so well done meant I was interested in actually looking into what each song was.
ReplyDeleteI liked the mix of colours here too, I think it really captures the changing moods throughout each song.
I like the idea!!
ReplyDeleteThese really do look lovely - and yes, they do look like the scottish hills. This is a very good interpretation and creative way of showing the graphs. Though, I think they would look better without the outlines on them - would still show what they are supposed to show, but would also look even more landscape y.
You wrote " I chose this because I wanted to use a sans-serif typeface that wasn't too bold" but why? Explain that!! :D
I also think that the very black colour used for text takes too much attention off the graphs. I think you should stick to grey, or, like people said, use colours to convey which "hill" refers to which song.
Right away when looking at the graphs I could see that they were to portray hills even before reading your rationale. It is also neat and organised which stops it from looking overcrowded and confusing. I do agree it is quite hard to identify each song at first and you could maybe make the data at the side of the graph grey ? As it stands out more than the title and your description at the top, I do not know if this is intentional or not ? Apart from that this is well designed.
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