It has been 4 years now - that Electronest started with Åbäke to design and redesign (and redesign, and …) the Kitsuné website together on top of the former very first version.
Kitsuné is most of the time defined as a record label, with Gildas Loaec at the head of it, sometimes Kitsuné is also presented as a fashion label where Masaya Kuroki is at work; sometimes Åbäke is also presented as being the third ingredient. I would like to say it’s a quite spicy ingredient. You might not know them yet, check their timid myspace: Abakespace - despite their evident lack of communication online they are doing quite nicely their job (which means I love it, and I love them to) and if it happens you’re actually a graphic designer or a ‘visual’ artist, it would be a shame for you not to know about them! Easier and much enjoyable, if you have the possibility, is to meet them at one of the event they are constantly part of. They are amazing, nice and wonderful.
For Kitsuné, they did all the great cover design you can see on the website, they also launched their own party/dj/set/event: ‘Kitsuné Amateur’; they’re working on various correlated events (like stage design) and doing all the promotion around the label: adverts for the up coming Kitsuné release, tour posters, creating the ‘Corporate Identity’ of AutoKratz, and also developing the identity of Digitalism and Cazals. They actually plan to design more objects to be produced through the Kitsuné brand (I insist Benjamin: it’s a shame the archive of the projects disappeared from the website for the re branding;). They are also working on the brand new Kitsuné Therese shop with Martino Gamper which is going to be simply awesome! Especially when you know how Martino and Åbäke loves to work together - you can’t simply wait for it to happen: you desperately want it to happen right now. Look at their Trattoria events they organise or their last book for Martino - that kind of things make me shivers!
Maybe after all, designing is all about a certain form of Trattoria: bring nice ingredients, nice people and let’s work on it.
That’s what we are still doing: improving the Kitsuné website recipe, subtly changing the flavours, by little touch…
It was my very first (semi) official webdesign job as an interraction designer when I was about to leave écal - my first public project involving mysql and all the likes (php, html, javascript) - Åbäke and I developed and pushed the Kitsuné website version 1 to the limit of what we could do with the early quite rigid structure. In fact it wasn’t really thought to last very long from the beginning - Kitsuné was still in its early age (despite its already huge renown) and the workflow wasn’t setup at all - soon new compilations came and special releases that were not really having a proper place semantically-speaking when looking at the website’s inner organisation. So the version 2 came to our minds quite quickly and the list of improvements we could do on top of the existing system was growing much more than what one could expect. It is an absolutely exciting thing to assist and see the thought development behind functionalities and aesthetics, how choices were made, the time it took - it was a kind of outsourced in-house design process, with a lot of experimental bits for me: working with Åbäke means most of the time reconsidering what you thought you knew under a complete different light - and i learned quite a lot from their design approach, in topics one wouldn’t think about: database design, information gathering, …
One of the database visualisation where elements are imbricating: their imbrication describes their relationship with a kind of semantical approach.
The recent major redesign brought the popup thingies down and greatly improved the navigation - with human readable urls and the use of a dedicated and customised Content Management System, which is now closer to a semantical approach of describing an object online: in a book you have a cover, and then chapters, paragraph, sentence, words, letter. Did you notice I didn’t speak about a page? My approach is rather based on the content, which means the website can now be adapted quite easily to any other way of presentation: visual layout can change, distribution platform as well - we can bridge and bootstrap anything from it.
The great thing when working with Åbäke in general, but this is especially true for the Kitsuné web site design for the version 2, is the discussion we had during the project - they all wanted (and still want) MORE!
They pushed the early guidelines to extreme limits. A lot of functionalities were added on the way, during the coding, which is one of the hardest thing to perform if you know a bit about Project Management and web design and coding… We even decided to start form scratch a few weeks before the official launch: that was almost the nightmare project!
The flexibility of the Electronest’s structure and the code we developed has been quite under pressure during that time, if one can say so - but the result is there: the website project survived the pressure and it is now a great machine to present and showcase their marvellous content; soon with the addition of the new e-commerce website the web experience of the brand will be really nice!
The typography is adapted to the fonts you have installed on your system - in any case we can’t precisely control the way a browser would render everything: so we decided to consider it a design parameters.
The Kitsuné website version 2 is quite nice with its top layer where the content is displayed, and an undercover blog which is used to announce special events, product releases, party, new collections… The undercover blog doesn’t show off as a blog even if, under the cover, it’s almost a new website to discover… You can always come back to the main page by clicking on the background of the page, and the back and forward button are completely useable.
More recent update brought a closer integration of the WordPress blog engine - the stated state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform. For the Kitsuné webdesign, WordPress has been used for the mini blog on the front page, and further inside for the Event Calendar inside Kitsuné Music and it will soon be used to feature extra content…
Kitsuné and Electronest definitely have more on the go…
(By the way, the recent redesign of the textasplayground / assembling website is for a big part inspired by the work Åbäke (and I) did for the Cazals - Amandine, also helped with her rigourous comments)