Showcase Of Music Night Clubs Web Designs

 

The time has come for the first showcase of music night club websites here on Smashing Magazine. We’ve scanned the Web up and down to find the most original and interesting online club identities. As usual, we have Flash websites and CSS eye candy. Please notice that the aim of the post was to showcase current web designs of music night clubs, so the gallery doesn’t necessarily showcase most usable or most beautiful night club web designs out there.

As we observed in the early Showcase of Fresh and Well-Designed Online Shops, the most obvious trend is the use of big bold pictures, either as backgrounds, headers or just side graphic elements thrown in the design mix. Most of them start playing music automatically (which is extremely annoying from the usability point of view), but in this case it’s not weird or off-putting because they are music club websites after all.

Another trend is the use of bright, vivid colors and intense color schemes, borrowed from the clubs themselves. Also, Flash clearly dominates in such web-sites, presenting some very unconventional navigation menus and very distinctive layouts that aren’t intuitive at all at the first glance.

Please feel free to use the comments area to suggest other club websites that you like.

Showcase Of Music Night Club Web Designs 

Anzu Club Anzu radiates a great vibe that mixes fluid and electronic, with creative Flash and amazing usability.

Sass Vienna A simple yet visually rich website, with great transparency and light.

Bar Music Hall At first glance, this looks like a horizontal navigation-based website, but a closer look reveals that the only horizontal thing that moves is the header. A nice original way to keep it simple yet effective.

Lux Fragil Ever wondered what kind of website Alice (of Wonderland) would want for her club? Pretty much one like this.

Matter London A simple and effective design that uses the right colors.

T Bar London Okay, this one is neither Flash nor the clean modern look, but it still looks classy without any fancy makeup. Just good old text (three columns) and images (one at a time).

Club Silo Prepare yourself for this one. Enjoy a full 3-D experience, with a cube-like menu put right in the middle of the club.

Blondie Bar This one is as cheap as it gets: static HTML with a flyer and embedded Tumblr blog. Not enough for a cool club? See for yourself.

Sugar Factory Some black and yellow awesomeness, with a lot of AJAX and nice blog integration.

Sub Club Minimal but definitely not simple, this one has the coolest menu in this entire showcase. Text at its best!

Macarena Club Don’t be fooled by the Latino-nostalgic name, we have a good-looking and really compact website here. The best part: fantastic player integration.

Favela Chic This one may be the only WordPress website in this roundup. A cool and efficient three-column theme. As visually random as the club itself.

Week End What if we could reduce a club website to its core feature: the schedule? We’d end up with this simple and beautiful calendar from the Week End club in Berlin.

Cube Club Very illustration-oriented, the Cube’s website must be the coolest entry by far for a CSS fan.

The Esplanade Also known as Espy, the Esplanade Hotel is one of the coolest live music venues in Melbourne and has a mesmerizing Flash website, with strong black and white graphics and beautifully crafted animations. I really like the cloud pre-loader.

Michelberger Part website, part zillion-instrument club website, this one is a Web illustration masterpiece. You can turn some knobs on the remote in the lower-right corner.

Trouw A simple grungy blog website, with all the info you need stored in small post-like areas.

Paradiso The audio player look and feel of this website is truly fantastic. Just zap around.

Dice Club This one looks more like a fashion website than a club one because the header is huge and has nice photos of the staff.

Baalsaal Another full-screen Flash-based website, with a beautiful illustration in the background.

Flex This one has a practical, down-to-earth approach, but with some cool graphics as well. Highlights: the calendar-like design and grid-based multimedia archive.

Beta Nightclub The Apple Computer of club websites. Glossy and stylish, with a great navigation system.

Watt Rotterdam Why didn’t I think of that? A full-width header that scrolls like a carousel makes this website look slick!

Residenz Lounge Cool flashy menu, and a good overall experience.

Barraca Amazingly seamless integration of large images and small widgets: audio player, live news feed, dynamic agenda, podcast and social media shortcuts.

Pacha Global Amazing Flash, with a dynamic menu and other interactive goodies.

Byblos What’s better for a club website than moving eye candy at full screen? Great execution and creative design.

Le General Nice communist propaganda design for Le General. You know why red is the color of choice!

Smart Bar Practically a one-page website, with buttons only for extra info, the Smart Bar website sports a few digital sticky notes with a very a fresh look.

Club Disco Another Flash production, this time in glossy-Matrix fashion.

Bourbon Street Great transparency and fake pop-up windows on this colorful Brazilian website.

Ministry of Sound The legendary MoS club has a slick website with a glossy but clean look.

We Love Music Great color scheme and some goofy illustration make for a simple but pleasant virtual trip to Ibiza.

Brica Bar Here we have cool Reservoir Dogs-like characters for menu items. The colored bubbles in the back are a great choice for this.

Bonus: Awdio Not really a club, but one of the biggest club-related achievements of the last years, Awdio is a jukebox that plays live music from the best clubs in the world. The layout is built around a Flash-based player that features various “stations” (live music venues).

 

29 Cool Music Videos

 

Music has always been an excellent source of inspiration. Particularly if you are stuck with some problem you can’t find a workaround for, a beautiful song can give you a new perspective, let you see the problem from a different angle. And sometimes it’s just useful to make a break — for instance, watching some music videos.

Music has always been an excellent source of inspiration. Particularly if you are stuck with some problem you can’t find a workaround for, a beautiful song can give you a new perspective, let you see the problem from a different angle. And sometimes it’s just useful to make a break — for instance, watching some music videos.

In this post we present some unusual music videos for your monday’s coffee break. Some of the videos are thought-provoking, some of them are funny and some are bizarre. While many of them are well-known, you’ll probably find some videos you’ve never watched before. The videos all perfectly to the music which is being played in the background. Hopefully, everyone will find something new and inspiring for himself/herself. Please notice that you might need to watch some videos at least twice to get the idea behind them.

You might want to read the descriptions of the videos — they are provided below every link. The screenshots often don’t reveal that much about the videos they stand for.

Music Videos #

Unkle - Rabbit in your Headlights What is this guy whispering? Who is the guy? And what is he doing in the tunnel? You need to watch this video till the very end. You won’t be disappointed.

Jason Forrest - “War Photographer” (2005) These freaking vikings are both cool and strange. But it doesn’t make them less sympathetic. And they can play both on drums and guitars pretty well.

Bat for Lashes — What’s A Girl To Do 00:38 is the best moment in the history of music videos. Well, this one is kind of scary. Hares driving on the bicycles and clapping their hands at the same time? A masterpiece from the year 2007.

Nick Cave & Kylie Mingoue — Where The Wild Roses Grow Probably one of the most beautiful music videos ever made. There is no need for words. Watch it.

Rob Dougan — Clubbed To Death Incredible editing and directing. So symbolic, so powerful.

Fujiya & Miyagi - Ankle Injuries What about a music video which is made with thousands of 6-sided dice? Exactly. And the music fits perfectly.

Radiohead – “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” (1995) The video for this song was shot using different film frequencies, allowing various actions to unfold at different rates within the same frame. The emotional effects of this practice range from silly to unsettling. Try not to watch this video too many times; it begins to feel a little more disturbing each time. [Jeff Shreve]

Sia – “Breathe Me” The production of this video clip took several thousands Polaroid photos. The result is… at least unusual.

Citizens Here and Abroad - You Drive and We’ll Listen To Music Jason Koxvold’s video pairs crashing cars with crashing guitars. Rock. Very well executed and perfectly edited. Must see.

Moby - Porcelaine Such a beautiful song. One of the videos you are amazed about once, and you never forget again.

The Strokes - You Only Live Once With a Hundred ways to do a dozen things, why not try it all? Directed by Warren Fu.

Arctic Monkeys - A view from the afternoon A song about a passion and unstoppable willingness to do what you love. Simple, yet so effective.

“Glosoli” - Sigur Ros “Glosoli” depicts a young drummer boy gathering up the other denizens of what appears to be an adult-free utopian land, and leading a revolution to freedom. So beautiful and so touching. Don’t miss the last scene.

The Avalanches - “Frontier Psychiatrist” This is freaky. Sometimes the most obvious concept for a video also turns out to be the best. The ghost choir is the best. Except for the nightmarish old-man turtle, of course.

Royksopp - Remind Me We’ve featured this movie already, but it’s worth mentioning it in this post. You can watch it dozens times and still not catch everything. A day in the life of an average working Jill, broken down into its minutest component parts. The unstated joke: mankind has erected immense, resource-devouring systems of almost incomprehensible complexity just so you can sit in your cubicle.

Blur - “Coffee & TV” (Quicktime) Actually, this song is about a dancing milk carton. However, its adventures are funny, cute, but with a pleasing streak of cruelty. The milk-carton protagonist even has its own fan site.

Boards of Canada: “Dayvan Cowboy” It’s pretty easy to get wrapped up in the grainy, existential pulchritude of this thing and completely miss the cheeky self-reference. So, um, where can one surf in Canada? Directed by Melissa Olson.

Move Your Feet - Junior Senior That’s weird. And that’s what makes it special. A pixel-based video clip.

Daft Punk - One More Time Probably one of the most colorful animated music videos of all time. Daft Punk, one more time.

Xploding Plastix - Joy Comes In The Morning A music video about the world we live in and the world we’d like to live in.

Unkle - Eye For Eye A haunting track with a creepy animation, which won an award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Nasty weirdness drops from the sky and then moves on.

Vitalic - Poney Flying dogs in light of a laser and in slow-motion. Nobody has ever done something like this before.

OK Go - Here It Comes Again

Justice “D.A.N.C.E.” Sometimes even T-Shirts can speak. For instance, in this music video. “D.A.N.C.E.” was nominated for “Video of the Year at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards. On the first of November Justice received the “Video Star” award at the European Music Awards in Munich.

Radiohead - Just What could the man on the street possibly have said?

Prodigy - Out Of Space Prodigy’s “Out of Space” is probably one of the weirdest videos ever created. Welcome back to the 90s — this is how some videos looked like then. The song which was * for the whole generation.

The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony A video everybody has seen. And everybody would see again.

RJD2 - Work It Out This guy just want to have some fun with his crooks and his skateboard. A one-shot-video from 2007.