JASMINE MOORMAN

I think overall I’m happy with the final design, I would have liked to have made it interactive rather than print based, this is something I want to explore in the future.

I think that the circle shape with spectrum colours represents the idea of a CD quite well, the musical terms and sheet music add to this.

The data is limited in the sense it’s only the most popular parts of one playlist, with a screenbased design more data could be added, similar to MoodAgent.

The idea of my design is that it can be used with anyone’s playlist. Here I have a second playlist; my fathers, he doesn’t have as many songs so there is only one ring instead of 3.

I also tried using a fade effect, the faded moods and songs are the less popular/less played ones. This is an alternative to the rating system. It shows that he listens to more songs in the warmer spectrum (major key with a faster beat) than in the cooler section.

This is my final design, I changed the layout of the key and description, made the whole thing slightly lighter. It’s an irregular shape, basically A2 but slightly wider. Star rating system around the outside.

To the print out I also added a cardboard divider to make selection easier.

Revised design, added a lot more moods and set them on a type path around the middle circle.

This was my first of my final designs:

After a tutorial I decided that a colour spectrum for the moods was the best way forward.

I tried it with only 4 moods, I found this didn’t work that well, plus the text didn’t blend well with the circle shapes. This needed revising.

After it occurred to me that a screen based idea wasn’t going to work I moved on to print, and sticking to my vinyl/CD theme I came up with a system that would work manually.

Below is the design in pieces, I was inspired by the rainbow “wheels” you see on the shiny side of a CD:

There are a number of websites and applications with a similar idea to mine. I looked into a few of these for research. The ones that stood out were stereomood.com and moodagent on the iphone.

Stereomood is an open playlist. It’s opening page is a list of moods (with the most popular in larger type) you click your mood and a prepared playlist starts playing. The instant access was brilliant, no messing around filling in forms, just click and play. It also features a wide range of music, introducing the listener to genres they are unlikely to have heard before.

Moodagent works with one’s own playlist on the iphone. It has a simple design that uses a system of bars to drag and select your mood, and the appropriate music from your playlist will be ordered in a table below.

I wasn’t sure how it would look as a digital piece. So I started creating circle graphs and shapes to try and get a feel for the design. These were all made in Indesign and Photoshop.