After the recent bout of Giocoso, Semplice and Niente software updates, I had a few spare days to consider the poverty of my graphic design skills in allowing me to navigate my music collection via various means.
What I'm referring to is this:
That's the page I see when I visit my classical music collection inside my Emby media server. To be honest, I don't actually use it very much; but it's a brilliant way to access large amounts of music whenever I'm overseas. So long as I have an Internet connection, my phone can play music from my music server running in the loft, no matter where on Earth I might be. When I do use it, therefore, I like it to be visually attractive and also easily navigable -and since I organise my music by Composer Name, it's important that the letters A to Z are displayed in a pleasing and highly visible manner. I therefore 'acquired' a stack of clipart Initial Capitals several years ago and use them as you can see above. They've served duty and are functionally fine ...except that they are clearly not a 'set'. The C and H looks like delicate iron fretwork, the J looks like a florist got excited, the L looks as if it's been on a diet, whilst the P looks like it's over-indulged on pies... and so on.
So, I spent the Easter weekend designing a new set of initial letters which are more consistent and present them here in the hope someone else might find them useful in the future:
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The result is a much more consistent, calm and colourful look for my Emby music landing page:
While I was at it, I realised that my icons for displaying different genres were a bit tired. Most of them looked like this:
So, I've revamped them like so:
I can't say I'm entirely happy with these re-worked 'genre icons': it's difficult to convey many genres conceptually, so I've ended up going down the literal, photographic route instead. That makes for 'busy' icons, I fear. If any actually good graphics designers are out there with ideas, I'd love to hear from you, basically! In the meantime, this lot will 'do'.
Incidentally, the complete set of genre icons is available from this page.
Fun and games, basically!