duggup

Artist: Various
Website: www.noise.net.au
Playback: various formats

The Victorian student branch of the Australian Graphic Designers Association of which I am a committee member is designing a new website. I am providing advice and technical assistance. During a planning meeting yesterday one of my fellow committee members suggested that I look at the NOISE website.

While this isn’t technically a music site – music features pretty prominantly as you will see. The NOISE is an Australian Government initiative to encourage Australian artists under 25 (that leaves me out), from all creative fields, although there are artists represented in the database from all over the world.

The idea is that artists submit work and if the NOISE staff approve – it may be made available for anybody interested to view or listen to, on the website for one entire week. As you can appreciate there are criteria you must meet, application forms to fill in and deadlines to beat. All of course very condusive to encouraging the emerging artistic talent of our nation.

Obviously I was less than thrilled with my first and quite probably last foray into this website. The FAQ says; “The aim of NOISE is to exhibit the work of young Australians to as wide an audience as possible.” My question then is why have they made it so difficult that none but the twitch generation (i.e. anybody under ten years old) can appreciate it?

The splash page is a con with nice clean lines, daily featured artist with some static artwork. Entering the site is not as bad as some designer websites I’ve had the misfortune to troll, but it took me quite a bit of looking around before I found one of the three possible audio off controls. Yes, you can have three different pieces of music playing at the same time while you run the gauntlet, working out where all the controls are hiding. I guess you could say that the NOISE lives up to its name.

More issues that made my visit to this website less than pleasant included; there being no method of interrogating the artist database from the first page – it takes three clicks to browse or search. At least a third of the screen real estate is given over to self promotion. My major peeve is if I turn the sound off on a website I expect it to stay off until I turn it back on. I don’t expect the sound to start up again every time a page refreshes, as it does on the NOISE.

There is a music jukebox that doubles as a pinball game – not sure about the point of this because the website managed to freeze my browser three times before I gave up and went to bed. Perhaps I remember the days when the Internet responded in days instead of milliseconds this means that I generally have quite a bit more patience than the average surfer – so heaven help the students expecting publicity from this website… Ah well, don’t they say that there is no such thing as bad publicity?

jools is a graphic designer who used to front a band on vocals and bass. All evidence of which have mercifully been obliterated or otherwise lost.
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