The swatch used in Sound Scan represents colours commonly found in music magazines such as Uncut. The Triple J application's use of red, black and white and the SoundHound application's use of orange, white and shades of black and grey as well as other numerous applications such as Metacritic's Movie Finder use simple colour schemes with a monochrome theme accented with one other main colour.
The colour also represents wealth and it's precious metal counterpart. In an industry where no one wants to pay for anything, due to the ease of taking it for free, it is important to remind the consumer of the quality of the product and of it's real worth.
The use of HelveticaNueue-Condensed, HelveticaNeue-Condensed Ultra Light and Light were inspired by the current domination of helvetica in all of Apple's products and it's reputation as being the most readable font. As music lovers are constantly in contact with graphic design, often of a very high standard, using recognisable but not-yet-overused typefaces was important. Making use of CSS3's custom fonts abilities and the jQuery framework the prototype uses the HelveticaNueue-Condensed oft file. In it's completed form Sound Scan would make use of all three of the typefaces used in the mock ups and all of the necessary font files for cross browser compatibility would be purchased.
The cult of Mac obsessives respect clean, stylish yet minimal design and leading logically to Mac's use of Helvetica. In providing a newer and altered version of what they already know and love I believe that these are the perfect typefaces for the application.
Icons
When using the jQuery framework it is easy to use their existing styles to create a stylish and minimal design with a familiar and smoothly functioning user interface. Attention to detail is very important in this case. With customised button icons you can gain originality while maintaining jQuery's successful interface and interactions.
Sound Scan uses a simple navigation menu using the buttons jQuery provides with some additional styling to match them with the colour scheme. The icons on these buttons relate to the different types of resources that may aid a consumer when trying to purchase music. A small headphones icon, clicked after the barcode of the product is scanned, leads the user to a page where they can select from a sub-menu what source of sound clips they would like to listen to. Itunes provides short clips, usually of every song on the release, of the widest range of music. Next the Band Camp and Sound Cloud pages of the artist are searched for and the music is grabbed, embedded and styled with the Sound Scan styling. Lastly a link to the next category, watch, is provided as often audio files of full songs are uploaded to You Tube and would thus provide the best "Try before you buy" resource when purchasing music. The next icon is a small video camera, representing the Watch section where all of the Vimeo and You Tube results are displayed, next the interview section has the icon of a microphone and lastly a star for the reviews section. The star was originally half filled and half outlined in order to represent a half star you might find in a review. When scaled down so small the detail disappears and the design becomes confusing. The star was then filled completely with white and used very similarly to the standard jQuery star icon.
The Sound Scan logo of the magnifying glass with the musical note is used to return the user to the scanning page. This is found in the upper right hand corner and due to the name of the application being so self explanatory the logo would obviously communicate to them that it leads back to the scanning page.
