The Challenge
Igor was starting a new company called Teentaal. He wanted to promote Indian Classical Music in Europe and encourage people to interact with Indian Artists. Being lovers of Hindustani Music ourselves we immediately related to his goals. He needed a website to host upcoming concerts and programmes and also to educate a European audience about Indian Classical Music and its rich heritage.

However, the site being primarily for a western audience, it could not be too "Indian" in its presentation. Yet, as it would also be visited by Indian artists who were interested in working with Igor's organisation, the site would have to appeal to their aesthetics as well. Musicians being a lot with a highly developed sensibility, we felt the site should have a seriousness and austerity that reflected the subject matter.

Igor also wanted the site and the CMS to be bilingual so we had to support content in both English and French.

The Process
Looking at sites of musicians around the web, was surprisingly of no help. Luckily for us, Igor had some beautiful photographs that became the source of our inspiration for the entire site. We scanned a page from an old book on Tabla bols and used that as the background for the site. We chose a charcoal grey for the backgrounds and laid white text on top. As the images were the focal point on all pages, this gave them maximum prominence. To bring visual interest to the design, we gave the images an animation effect that made them appear to swipe in and out of the page.

Breaking away from convention, we decided to place the company logo in the bottom right of the page, below the image. This gave us a really clean and uncluttered navigation system. However, this caused one obvious problem. People viewing the site on smaller screens, found the logo partially cut at the bottom. we came up with a clever hack. The logo always sticks to the bottom of the browser screen and masks the image positioned above.

To make language selection and the page URLs as user-friendly, we implemented URL rewriting for the entire website. Users choose their language just below the primary navigation bar.

The Result
The first thing Igor told us after the site was up that all who saw the site found it extremely elegant and beautiful. His main concern was whether his target audience both in India and abroad would relate to the site as well as to his company.

His first concerts have been a great success and have given other artists a reason to work with him. The site is an integral part of his work and acts as a connecting bridge between his musicians and his audience.

One of the inner pages of the site.
Show me a larger image.