"A new online music service claims to have found a way to lure users away from illegally downloading tracks" says The Grauniad. And indeed, I wish good luck to PlayLouderMSP, as the offspring of two companies I produced much work for. I actually designed PlayLouder.com when I was working for state51 a couple of years ago, and while I wouldn't design it like that now, I'm still kinda proud that pretty much exactly the same design is still up there and working.
It's by the far the most punkass thing I ever made (appropriate to the brand, methinks): insanely harsh colour schemes, yellows and oranges as multiple focal points at once, to pull the eye all over the screen; big f***off background jpps of urban detritus which just deliberately drop out half way down the screen; deliberate rudery around banner ads; a 'we don't care' approach to screen real estate (below the fold indeed); and an almost totally unusable pull-out search thing in the left hand nav on a floating DIV. It's a bit of mess, but (half-serious) deliberately so, and due to the diligence and nous of the team behind it, is still around some years later - having seen off much competition. There is some quite nice IA/interaction design (imho) around the review section, but much needed looking at almost immediately post-launch. Which didn't happen. But the nice thing is that it's still up there, almost working well enough.
And good luck to them with the MSP thing - looks really interesting.
