As you may have noticed Kevin added the live music in Reno links at the bottom of the nav bar. This info is being pulled from Scott's (Kevin's brother) site Playinghere.com. The site is a cool resource that allows you to see local music venues -- mostly scrapped from MySpace.com. See the About Section for more info.

DESIGNING
Another fun tidbit about this site is I helped Scott with the design. We went through several design iterations. Since this project had no real time constraints and Scott was not sure what he wanted in terms of design, I started with the logo.

 

Scott wanted the flexibility to add more information blocks and asked if I could create a flyer board with multiple flyers to display information. After looking at several band flyers and flyer walls on flickr , myspace , etc. I came up with a colorful and tattered wall of flyers. The drawback of this design was a lack of hierarchy and it was difficult to implement and change.

We scrapped the flyer idea but brought the logo over to the new design. Scott liked the stage metaphor to promote local music. So I did a quick "cutout" design of a stage. I decided the speakers were a strange waste of space and the logo could not really stand-alone wrapped in the banner background.

Scott wanted the logo outside of the content area so I created one of the final mock-ups. 

Scott has an area for suggestions. 

REFLECTION
Designing playinghere.com was a challenge because it was a project with no constraints or consequences. What I mean is the site was for fun and it had no budget, no design document, and no timeline. I produced at least three distinctly different designs and enjoyed how the design evolved during the process. I learned even more about how to design advanced/web 2.0 layouts.

Kudos to Scott for getting this site together on his nights and weekends all while he was waiting on me and getting ready for a big move!