For those who don’t know (or can’t be bothered to click on the link), Ghostly are an eclectic independent record label based in Ann Arbor. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me raving about the fantastic music they put out on many an occasion. Artists like Kiln and School of Seven Bells are a huge influence on my own music, and most of you will probably be aware of Tycho, the musical alter-ego of designer Scott Hansen / ISO50 (and if you’re not, then shame on you — click that link!).

Anyway, the iPhone app… Ghostly Discovery is essentially a way of unearthing the many gems in Ghostly’s catalogue. You don’t search for songs or browse artists and albums — as per the usual song-finding paradigm — but instead discover music based on your mood and the style of the music you’re after. While setting the mood is pretty innovative (sliding a colour wheel where colours represent moods like ‘frenetic’, ‘laid back’, ‘introspective’, and ‘aggressive’), it’s the styles selector I really love; you have two sliders (think mixing desk faders): one to slide between ‘digital’ and ‘organic’, and another to slide between ‘faster’ and ’slower’. With everything all set, you hit ‘discover’ and a playlist is generated to suit your input. Hooray — new music!

Once you’re into the playlist screen you’re given a few details about the track and some decent-sized album art. Clicking on the ‘menu’ button beneath the artwork then presents some extra options, like being able to buy the track directly from iTunes or read the artist’s bio. You can save tracks to your favourites and the previous / next controls shoot you to completely different artists and albums, so there’s a nice sense of random discovery maintained throughout the entire experience.

Finding new music can be a distracting task during the day so I’ve found myself firing up the app while cleaning my teeth or getting ready in the morning, walking around with some interesting sounds coming out of my pocket before settling down for a day’s work. And by adding tracks to my favourites, it’s a nice reminder to visit the Ghostly Store later in the day and make a purchase (I’m not really a per-track kind of guy — it’s either the whole album or nothing).

Ghostly’s catalogue covers a relatively wide range of genres to appease most eclectic tastes, but even if you’re not a fan of the music, the UI on this app should appeal. It looks good, it keeps things very simple, and hats off to them for ditching the usual way of finding music. If you want to search for something specific, this app will frustrate you, because it’s not about that: it’s about finding something you would never have known to search for.

This video demonstrates things quite nicely:

Of course, I won’t pretend to be blind to the fact that this is an exercise in intelligent marketing: from a commercial point of view, this has huge potential to drive sales for Ghostly, especially from those who might not usually go out of their way to find new music. But hey, I can live with that. Ghostly is a label with a lot of integrity and a lot of great music, and if they can make some money and turn on some new fans, then good for them. Personally I think we live in an age where discovering genuinely interesting new music can be hard when so much crap is shoved into our ears, so it’s nice to see a company trying to counteract that with a fun tool like this.

Has anyone else used the app? What do you think? Do you have any other eclectic app suggestions?

(By the way, although this post is full of praise for Ghostly and their app, I promise I wasn’t paid to write it. I’ve decided to start writing more about apps than I previously have done so far.)

How do you create your navigation when you’re using WordPress? How do you control the order of the items when you have to use functions like wp_list_pages and wp_list_categories?

The answer is simple: hard-code your nav!

You see, when using WordPress, we seem to get caught up in a particular mindset: one that says, “I must make everything updatable through the back-end.” And sure, when you’re creating a theme for public use or a for site that’s going to be changed constantly by a client, that’s a sensible approach to take. But what about your personal site, where you’ll be maintaining everything and writing all of the templating code anyway? What about your clients’ site where you’ll be the webmaster, and where updating the nav structure will be a simple HTML edit every six months?

Hard-code it.

I touched on this subject very briefly in response to an audience question when I spoke at the FOWD Tour in Bristol the other week and I’ll be expanding upon it again when I return to the subject for FOWD New York in November. There are times when it’s simply not practical to jump through all those CMS templating hoops just to achieve something that would take seconds to hard-code. So seriously, go out there and hard-code your nav. Stop worrying and get on with it.

But if you insist

For those of you who do want to create your navigation with WordPress’ built-in functions and therefore keep things as dynamic as possible — but want to control the ordering to some degree — here’s a solution you might be interested in, as suggested to me via email by David Smith:


<?php wp_list_pages('include=7&title_li=&depth=1'); ?>
<?php wp_list_categories( $catargs ); ?>
<?php wp_list_pages('exclude=7&title_li=&depth=1'); ?>


Although there’s some debate about whether making two database calls with wp_list_pages is a good idea, it’s certainly a solution, and demonstrates that WordPress can be relatively flexible when using include and exclude arguments.

However, it was important to establish a connection between Rhys’ albums in spite of their differences, so the same typeface was used — the beautiful Fontin — along with the same basic layout for the interior elements. The photo at the bottom of this page shows the two albums together to illustrate their consistency, with Dulcima placed at the top.

The album is released in October on Termo Records and you can buy it from Burning Shed.

In addition to the new site, Fusion Ads need an ‘advertiser kit’: a PDF they send out to potential advertisers that describe the way the process works, the fees involved, how to create a campaign, etc. Although a PDF already existed, it needed rethinking completely to present the information in a good-looking, easy-to-digest way, and it also needed to reflect the brand guidelines I’d developed for the new site.

Along with the advertiser kit, I also created some simple Fusion Ads business cards.

The site allows Christopher to publish a variety of different content and it styles the posts accordingly, using nothing more complicated than WordPress’ categories feature and some automatically-generated class names. Using forward-thinking CSS3 to give the site some subtle visual enhancements and a touch of jQuery to keep the navigation minimal, the result is a minimal but versatile blog.

Please note: these images are taken from the Photoshop mock-ups. Anything and everything could change. Also, the dinosaur character was not illustrated by me.