(Lykke Li by ToastyKen used under CreativeCommons)
News. News. News. What’s that all about?
It’s how we keep in touch with our artists. All of us know that we enjoy keeping up to date with information about our favourite artists just as much as we need to discover new ones. That’s what Gigulate is all about. We’re obsessed with all kinds of music information. You’ll be able to find out what your artists have been up to, and News is just the start of it. The Gigulator’s going to start crunching up all sorts of juicy snax that will make sure you’re more informed about your artists than you’ve ever been before.
We’re putting some extra effort in to make sure everything works really smart before we let the riff-raff in. We’ve decided to invest in some super-clever technology that will give us the chance to really blow each other’s mind in 2009. Do keep us posted with things we can fix and keep up the great ideas – it won’t be long, now.
Until then, here’s five stories from the last week that we discovered first on Gigulate.
Coldplay, Chris Martin hints at imminent retirement – Contactmusic
Sheikh felt ‘betrayed’ by Michael Jackson – Yahoo Music UK
Lykke Li announces brand new American tour dates – Pitchfork
Jimi Hendrix’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell found dead – NME
Kanye West denies assaulting photographer – People
More updates from us, soon.
xx
Firstly let me introduce myself. I’m John Martin, resident design monkey (or Chief Creative Officer – my official title) here at Gigulate. Firstly I would like to thank all the people that came along to our mini Gigulate Beta launch party. Thank you. We all know you really came for the free badges anyway. I thought I’d talk about some of the visual styles of the Gigulate beta and some of the key theories behind the design.
Fig 1. News Volume in the last 7 daysThe main over-arching visual of Gigulate is displaying data in the most simple and easy to use manner. Whether it’s the mini bar charts on our source pages (see Figure 1) or the simple artist graphics that display artist popularity (see Figure 2). It’s all designed to ensure that you’re getting the richest dataset in the simplest way. Don’t get me wrong, I love intricate diagrams that display complex data. Like the number of uses of Comic Sans on the internet plotted against the use of Microsoft Word as a HTML publishing platform (the correlation between these two are dangerously high).
Fig 2. Artist infographicHowever for every bit of data you put in an infographic the more obfuscated the original intention becomes. It’s a very hard thing to have to pull back on some of the really exciting data that we have flying around the Gigulator and think of the most useful way of displaying that dataset. I feel we are beginning to really get our data together now. It’s become 2nd nature for me to trawl through the Gigulator logs and start seeing interesting charts that could be valuable on the site. The key is to not get too carried away, stop and consider whether a user would find that venn diagram useful.
We’ve done a lot of research on what’s the best way for people to consume the information that we are outputting on pages. We feel like we are approaching the ideal solution. It’s a happy medium between sparklines next to every artist mention and just dumping the tablature data on every page.
Right, I’ve rambled on for too long now. Cheerie-bye-balls.John
