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Smothered in Argyle

Smothered In Argyle was a Binghamton, NY-based art-prog quartet active from 2002-2006.  The frontman, a film buff, wanted movie-like elements in the site: a film-noir look, a widescreen aspect ratio, scrolling credits, and even a direct homage to the film Memento on the landing page.  The client also liked the look of strange Photoshop filters on images (every web designer has a story or two like this) and so some of the background elements are filtered.

For simplicity's sake, we went with a fixed-height design, controlled by a frameset, with upper and lower frames taking up the slack space and showing the band's name and a copyright notice, respectively.  DIVs were used to either create floating text boxes, or anchored text areas, where appropriate.  The bgslieght JavaScript hack was used to ensure that Internet Explorer 6 users saw the semi-transparent backgrounds properly.  All links inside the site called the entire frameset (by way of a PHP document where we could inject the name of the content page to display), to prevent a search engine visitor from ever getting linked to only a content frame.

The cassette tape on the audio page was a personal favorite.  The client had come up with this story about "Quentin Vong," a name I discovered on a piece of spam that the client liked.  We found the cassette photo on a stock images site, and transplanted the artist/album name on the cassette with Vong's name and "It Works for Me," the subject of the spam e-mail.  There's even a progressive blur on the text I added to match the bokeh of the photograph.

At certain times there were PDF flyers available for the street team, wallpapers, and a downloadable "mix pack" of one of the band's songs.