JohnVanDeusen.com

recording artist website

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tools/skills used: github, HTML5, Pixelmator, iMovie, DaVinci Resolve, FFmpeg, Audacity

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I’m John’s website guy, and his site has changed a lot over the years.

For the current version, he asked for something very simple: he wanted a looping video of him sitting in the grass reading a magazine with birds chirping in the background. I had an interesting time creating the video loop and audio loop and fiddling with what web browsers allow for autoplaying. I added a button to mute and unmute the audio which is muted by default in most cases. I also asked him to draw the buttons himself, which I then scanned and turned into the buttons you see on the page, which expand slightly when you hover over them. Simple, fun, and tactile. This iteration of the site is live over at johnvandeusen.com.

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This website you’re on right now (cdrive.site) actually started out as an evolution of an idea that I had worked on for John to make a GeoCities-esque 90s-vibe homepage, complete with loud Under Construction GIFs, a guestbook, and more. That version of the site was his homepage for a couple years and can still be seen here on the Wayback Machine. I’ve included some screenshots down below.

As fun as it was, it wasn’t particularly professional, and was probably a little bit of a head-scratcher for record label people to see. It lived a good little life and I’m glad we got to do it. The floating Winamp player (which relies on the Webamp project) still made it onto cdrive, where you’ll find it in the bootlegs section and maybe other sections, soon…