Designer Interview: Matthew Smith

by Jonathan Longnecker | March 17, 2010 | Filed in Design, Interviews

Matthew Smith

Matthew Smith is the main guy at SquaredEye and an experienced Creative Director and designer for top companies, with a BA in Fine Arts, a two-year stint in visual art in the UK, and apprenticeship at the RMAC. Matthew also speaks and writes for the web design community (AIGA SC, Digital Web, et al.). When he's not designing, you'll find him building treehouses for his two young boys or sipping on a fine Belgian Tripel with his wife Amy.

What are you listening to right now?

• Ashley Prior Sets (from IHOP.org/theprayerroom)
• Apparat
• Milosh
• Tycho

Could you share your thoughts on the link between creating something and and having music be a part of that? Is it important to your process or distracting?

Music isn't a medium of utility, its a medium of beauty. Its important that as we design we are operating with both sides of our brains turned on. The best design is initiated by the more logical left brain, but enhanced and awakened by the more creative right brain. Music helps us do that. In some ways, its also appropriate to approach music the way actors use method-acting techniques. If I'm designing a high class elegant site I might throw down some mozart, or even Brian Eno, but if I'm working on a farm site, I'll listen to some Old Crow Medicine Show and get my blue grass on.

Headphones or speakers? What kind?

Bose On-Ear do me well.

Do you remember the first album you picked up at a CD store based solely on the cover?

Red Hot Chilli Peppers. My mom …

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New Feature: Edit Your Entries

by Jonathan Longnecker | February 22, 2010 | Filed in Design, General

We finally found the time to put in a feature we had always intended to have, but wanted to get the site launched first. You can now edit your own entries! If you're logged in, just go to an album's detail page that you shared and you should see a yellow button that says "Edit this Entry." Click that puppy and you can edit everything you put in. We've been using it internally for a bit, but please let us know if you run into any problems. That's pretty much it! We hope you enjoy it, and as always thanks for using DesignersMusic.

Rock & Roll, Jon & Nate

Making Some Small Adjustments

by Jonathan Longnecker | January 10, 2010 | Filed in Beta, Design

Thanks to everyone's great input, we've modified how some of the internal linkage works when viewing albums. Before, the large green button at the bottom of the album popup would take you straight to Amazon.

Yeah that's great, send your users away from the site first thing. Good job, guys. So in an attempt to get users to actually explore the site a bit more that button now takes you to the album detail page. We also added the user that submitted the album back in with a link to their profile.

We also wanted to make sure users understood why we were funneling them to Amazon so we added a small disclaimer bar at the top of each album page that explains what's going on. This gives the user a much easier way to get back to DM as well as reinforcing how they got there.

The jury's still out on whether we need the album preview in the popup window or if we should only have it on the detail page. If you have an opinion, let us know in the comments. Launch is coming soon, and …

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