NPR Music hosts amazing musical acts to perform behind their Tiny Desk but needed a web presence that could support a contest to find unknown talent.
If you haven't seen a Tiny Desk concert on NPR then stop reading this now and go check one out (seriously, so good). The one thing the Tiny Desk team is always in need of is talent. Having secured a sponsor for a new contest to find unsigned musicians, they came to the Digital Media team for help developing a site that would accept entries.
My role in the project was to art direct a promotional video that would run as pre-roll on every Tiny Desk video for a month as well as design a submission form.
The team and I quickly agreed that we could do more than just a fluffy form and decided to use the site for promotion as well. One of the contributions I made to the site that I am most proud ofwas working with our legal team to pull out the most important pieces of legalese from the Terms and Conditions and make them design elements on the page. This allowed us to keep most of the more verbose parts of the Terms behind a link. More importantly, it also meant that even though we had many, many submissions, a large majority of them followed the necessary rules and could be considered.
The second biggest piece of content on the page, other than the form, was the section about judges. This also happened to be one of my favorite visual elements on the page. Obviously, the judges are a huge draw for musicians, to simply be heard by one of the judges is motivation enough to submit, but the roster was so impressive that I wanted a visual that couldn't be ignored. Eventually, after being fed up with a lot of the safer options, I landed on an organic structure that mimicked an audio wave form.
