QUEEN. The Champions of the World

The 2007 website was a very laconic one, and contained brief information about band’s members, and official discography with songs listing. The website’s design was based on images from “Innuendo” album which, in their turn, were based on works of Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard who is best known as Grandville. Thanks to this conciseness, that website consisted of only one sole page:

Working on new version of website, we decided to develop this idea and to make something like chronology which would include a detailed enough info about pre-Queen period; official British discography of the band and it’s members solo, accompanied with a set of interesting facts and photos; information about some non-album projects, and about Queen after the death of Freddie Mercury.

We draw a sketch to see how it may look like:

In accordance with this plan, we make a list of events to easily see where band’s activity intersects with musicians’ solo activity. There’ve been some difficulties with years after 2001, but we’ve come through it:

Now we have to estimate how to compose all these events to make everything easy to read, to avoid emptiness, and to graphically separate one “plotline” from another. What about graphical separation, right away we reject complex and ornate Innuendo theme that was used in the previous version of website, and going to use something more austere and minimalistic. And all we need — is Hot Space album cover:

Perfect. Using this artwork we assign colours to each musician, and then draw a mockup:

Moreover, all “plotlines” will have their own links colours also taken from Hot Space album cover.

What about Queen’s line, we won’t use fuchsia colour as soon as it’s too bright and illogical. We divide band’s chronology into 3 periods (and it corresponds to what it was in real Queen history) and then try to find inspiration in other albums covers. We stop at Greatest Hits II and recolour it according to our idea:

Now we need to contrive how the header will look like. It was planned that it would consist of four portraits of musicians, and of small amount of text. Like all the rest on this website, these portraits will be situated in chronological order — sorted by date of joining the band. And there are a lot of doubts, but nevertheless we’ll try to use Innuendo images:

And yes, all the doubts were absolutely right. First, too many small details, and it stands out of the concept. Second, it is absolutely out of style. Third, these pictures don’t clearly show which badge colour corresponds to which musician and why. So we return to Hot Space images, and we decide that badges will also have images of band members. Now there won’t be any mess in our “plotlines”.

What is there left for me to do with this site? Simply to add some photos and incomparable Freddie Mercury’s quotations to chronology.

Previous versions

Fifth:

Fourth:

Third:

Earlier versions unfortunately gone away.