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Thursday, May 18th

Grand Design: Epitonic

Grand Design Header
Have you seen the new Epitonic redesign? It was done by E.A.D., a design studio in Brooklyn, NY. Click More for details from Juliette Cezzar, one of the designers on the project.

Juliette Cezzar: First, a little context and caveat…we’re really a handful of people trying to revive the site: two editors, two designers (me and an assistant), one person manning the back-end server side of things, one person doing pr, and one talking to labels. Since all of us are dedicated to other things (no one is working full-time on epitonic — we don’t have those kinds of resources) the first round of redesign took about four months (two months too long), at which point we were directed to put it up, bugs and all, or end the project. So what you’re seeing is a very public design development phase, not exactly ideal, but better than having to shut down our efforts.

What we were looking to do was to have a site that was like nothing else on the web, and that wasn’t designed for the lowest common denominator in terms of screen size, hardware, and browsers. At the same time, we wanted something that could incorporate a flash player in the site that would save users’ playlists and offer the same functionality as itunes but with the option to download tracks and buy albums, all within the same window. The html part of the site runs off a build system, and to accommodate the changing content and take advantage of different users’ configurations there are fluid css 3-d boxes on each page. Basically, what this means is that if you have a small screen, you see it one way, and if you have a larger one, you have a different presentation that doesn’t leave you with an acre of empty space.

This being a free and independent music site, it makes sense for it to have an experimental design. However, given our circumstances, we have walked into an experimental process also, where now every user is potentially on our QA team. It’s not ideal, but people have made a lot of good suggestions and it’s really helped us prioritize the next round of revisions (and I don’t mean the ones who leave messages to eat shit and die).

We’re working on this second (pretty massive) round of revisions to the design of the site to help make it easier to navigate, log in, and search, and working with our server-side back-end guy to resolve login and player-to-html functionality issues, as well as bring back the blackbox and genre-selected radio. I hope you’ll stay tuned and forgive us for asking for so much patience.

Thanks much to Juliette Cezzar of E.A.D. for taking the time to give us some insight into such massive project. Be sure to check out Epitonic for good (and free) MP3’s. I’ve been visiting for years and have kept many downloads in steady rotation. - Seth

Written by Seth Werkheiser
> Design, Music | 2:00 pm |

16 Responses to “Grand Design: Epitonic”

On 05/18/06 3:08 PM, thewake said:

It’s about time. I didn’t know if they were ever gonna update.
On 05/18/06 4:18 PM, The 1/3 said:

The new design is absolutely terrible.
On 05/18/06 4:22 PM, carl said:

I saw the new design a few weeks ago and haven’t bothered going back since, I can’t download mp3’s anymore because there is no Flash 8 player for Linux.
On 05/18/06 6:09 PM, Sean said:

yeah, the fact that flash 8 isn’t available for anything doesn’t help.
On 05/18/06 6:11 PM, Sean said:

however, i do like the design. it’s better than the previous one (duh!).
On 05/19/06 1:43 AM, carl said:

yeah, the fact that flash 8 isn’t available for anything doesn’t help.

yeah, anything other than windows and macos.
On 05/20/06 8:55 AM, smick said:

it took me a couple minutes to understand the new design (squinting at the page, scrolling up and down wondering where/what to click next), but once i figured it out it’s pretty okay. like riding a bike (even though the original epitonic site was a reliable car that worked fine).
On 05/20/06 4:42 PM, lid said:

I don’t like it.
On 06/14/06 12:39 PM, cpawl said:

I have honestly have not seen a worse modern website than this. Maybe the goal was to be pretentious and hip and appear “retro” but they failed in every aspect. A professional design company made this? The code is horrible, my mom with a copy of frontpage would have more sense.

If your thought Epitonic was dead before, now it is dead for sure.

The site has my vote for the biggest design mistakes on the Web.
On 01/5/07 5:38 AM, Mark said:

Its nice to see the guys that designed it discussing it like this, though. It was helpful for me to read

I’ll be honest. Practically speaking, the design is terrible. And whilst I can’t really say it doesn’t look nice, it isn’t hugely logical due to the flexible nature of those floaty box things so it isn’t always immediately obvious what to click and where to go next. Also, the fact that clicking back in your browser causes the media player (and subsequently your downloads) to stop is a big bugbear.

It’s also somewhat of a bone of contention that a site about alternative and cutting edge music is now /almost/ practically unusable to download said music. Even though the old design was dated and not hugely exciting, it worked. It was functional, and it didn’t occasionally just stop because the browser was too confused to carry on.

So, nice to hear you guys are still working at it. Don’t give up, y’hear?
If you read this at all, that is.
On 03/13/07 9:03 PM, shorn said:

i think its sweet. i love the background and that the layout changes with the screensize. i think that the 3Dness is a bit old. the radio is good too.
On 04/17/07 8:12 AM, Brewster said:

Damn! I am really in a panic! Epitonic is not working, the site is down. I hope it is not permanent. Does anyone know???
On 04/19/07 6:42 PM, Me too said:

Yeah. is the site down???
On 04/22/07 1:44 PM, tomasz said:

noo! it’s not working right now! good alternate site to check out is insound.com click on free mp3’s on the top and there you have it. it’s no epitonic, no doubt, but it’s worth checkin out.
On 06/12/07 12:40 PM, Brewster said:

It’s back!!!!!!
On 10/30/07 3:48 PM, jonathan becker said:

IT’S DOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i tried contacting juliette cezzar about the situation. hopefully some action will be taken. epitonic is an important internet resource…………

Thursday, May 18th

Grand Design: Epitonic

16 Responses to “Grand Design: Epitonic”

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