Inspired by the NME article titled ‘Ian Curtis: why the enigmatic Joy Division frontman remains British indie’s greatest unknown pleasure’ by Barry Nicholson, I decided to design an interactive website celebrating Joy Division. Next year marks the 44th anniversary of the release of ‘UNKNOWN PLEASURES’ and the website could be launched to celebrate the iconic album as well as to honour Ian Curtis.
’44 UNKNOWN PLEASURES’ is a collection of digital and analogue photographs all taken in Manchester and Macclesfield in October 2022. The visuals are accompanied by quotes I sourced during my visit to British Pop Archive where I accessed great resources like fanzines and Rob Gretton’s scrapbooks.
View the final website design below (make sure your sound is on), and keep watching
to see the STORE where one could purchase limited edition prints of photographs in three different sizes.
The concept behind the website is analogue photography. As we all know, analogue photography is the great unknown – one never knows how the photograph is going to turn out until they develop it and they will always wonder what could have been had they chosen different settings. This goes back to the article by Barry Nicholson in which he contemplates ‘what could have been’ had Ian Curtis not committed suicide.
There is a contradiction on the website – the analogue camera opens wide, and the viewer pulls the film out from the roll so see the images. In reality that would expose the film damaging it permanently. However, here the photographs remain – this is how I would like to think of Ian Curtis. Just like the photographs on the film he should be gone. But he is not because we, the fans who love his music, are keeping his memory alive.
Website design process
Creating a user-friendly flow in Figma
While designing the website I came across many problems which I successfully tackled:
I aimed to create a website prototype with music inside it. However, I found out that Figma only allows sound per frame – I was not able to have music playing in the background. To solve it, I learned to create a link to Spotify and that link was an integral part of the website.
User Experience – getting feedback was very valuable as it showed me that only because I think something is working does not mean that it is obvious for everyone else. For instance, I thought that sometimes a little X in the corner was enough but someone else suggested that the more natural way would be to add a button.
Creating a flow for the website was a challenge and it required multiple links – I found that I instinctively clicked in top left corner to get to exit the store and to the main site when the link was not there, so I added one.
Everything had to be legible and readable – the small size of the film frames meant that the images were small too. Therefore, I had to enlarge the film so the text within the images was easily recognizable. Unfortunately, that meant that everything was very big and overwhelming. I needed to ensure that the website wasn’t too busy and I achieved that by reducing opacity of the camera – it shifted focus to the highly contrasting images whilst keeping the background toned down.
