Mezzanine Stairs

Looking ahead to the release of World’s End, we’re shifting some of our attention to the challenge of publishing. One of the major pre-launch items on our list was making a long-overdue update to our web site. While the 90’s era web aesthetic of our previous design was entirely intentional, it didn’t make a great first impression of our work. Also, in 2023, it was probably time to enter the smartphone era.

Our rather minimilistic site design lent itself well to being adapted to the small screen, but the content needed some attention. First of all was the diminutive 80×60 pixel thumbnails which have no place on modern, high-dpi phones. Fortunately, the majority of our graphics are based on vector art and we were able to create new, high resolution versions without too much trouble.

I added limited Twitter card support and an audio player somewhere along the line, but the old site sat largely unchanged since the latest design update from 2007. Since I had to refamiliarize myself with the site’s workings, I decided to give the desktop design some attention while adding the mobile style.

I had been meaning to install the audio player on the home page to conveniently showcase our work, but as I was rendering our Flash based art samples to video and replacing embedded YouTube videos with self-hosted ones, I realized that our music videos are much more captivating than a boring audio player. So, now we have video on the home page with a bigger, more prominent play button than even I had hoped.

640×480 and modem friendly mezzaninestairs.net 2001~2023.