what's a topster? in short, it's a collage of albums that the maker picked out. most of the time filled with cuts that they enjoy a lot, or have had a lot of impact on the person. a visual and compact way of describing your music taste. here's a few topsters from my friends as an example.
it was sort... of a test on my abilities in making a site.
though i've been doing web design for quite.. a bit, i never particularly made an 'interactive' site with functionality. for some reason? a lot of my work came down to fixing up certain parts of a site, and even my own personal projects had minimal interactivity because of my lack of ideas.
i already had a blog aggregating my reviews of korean hip hop albums i've enjoyed, but i wanted to make something that painted my tastes a bit more wider than just the albums i write long form reviews about. i got inspired by 'topsters' shared among other likeminded music nerds and got to work.
although i loved how succinct posting an image of a topster is, and how easily it could spark a conversation between other people who overlap with my taste in music. i wanted a place to talk about my favorite albums in more depth, but without the commitment of a full on album review. which is why i decided to make this site.
as you can see, the site's aesthetics are heavily derived from windows xp. i didn't particularly have an aesthetic in mind when i came up with the idea, and im not really the most creative person out there when it comes to coming up with a consistent style of a site. so i utilized the XP.css framework i've been eyeing for a while. it's fitting considering i grew up with winXP alongside the music on the chart.
i'm not particularly fond of how i went about making this site and how it looks, i had to go through some stupid workarounds for certain things, but what matters is that i finished it. right? guys?
the reviews are especially something... but you know, sometimes an album is good cause it's good, and sometimes it's good cause i was sixteen when i first listened to it.
in the end, it was good practice in working with and around pre-existing libraries, flexboxes (you can never practice flexboxes enough), trying to make the mobile version usable (keyword: trying), and studying existing UI's and emulating it. 3/10 would not recommend this for a portfolio project. in a previous version of this box, the last part said "thank god i don't plan on moving jobs anytime soon." oh my hubris.. or was it my procastination..?
