An immense and infinitely searchable database of popular music
UX/UI or Interface design, logo, and packaging
Backstory
It’s 1995 and CD ROMs are still fairly new and cool. System Simulation teamed up with Penguin Electronic and Michael Wadleigh to create the ultimate database of popular music. They envisioned an infinitely searchable discography of recordings and musical works data from the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society’s (MCPS) National Discography database. The database was searchable by artists, writers, contributors, studios, products, works, recording track times and line-ups, dates, popularity, places, and words themselves.
System Simulation’s unique relational database architecture, Penguin’s publishing empire, and Wadleigh’s audacity conspired to make this impossible project possible. My role was to design the interface.
The interface
This was a many-to-many relationship with a dizzying amount of information. 800,000 recordings, 400,000 works, 200,000 products, 100,000 writers, 90,000 artists, 62,000 popular charts, 30,000 publishers, 15,000 dates, and way more. Everything was accessed through a CD landing screen and displayed on a little desktop window – which was not all that large in the 90s.
In new territory, the natural instinct is to bring along the familiar. I had just finished eWorld and was happy with the impact a real-world metaphor had on organizing information and predicting your experience. But this was more like a tree that could be approached from every leaf and every root tip. To make it easier to orient, there were a handful of top-level categories that could be mixed, matched, and shown in results pages – artists, recordings, genres, roles, products, popularity, dates, places, writers, works, words. What was the metaphor here? At the end of the day, there wasn’t one.
Michael liked the hexagonal interlocking landscape of the Giant’s Causeway. A hexagon is a handy shape for organizing space as well. It was used to contained hand-drawn imagery for the top categories. These drawings then became the icons that oriented you to the type of content that was dished up with any imaginable search.
A detailed review of the product by Victor Cardell was archived on Semantic Scholar.