When Lumen Records asked for an album site that felt like the album, I thought I knew what they meant. I didn't. The first three rounds were essentially "scroll for more" with better photography. They sent them all back.

The breakthrough came at the end of week three. Mia, the photographer, was watching me click through a scrub preview and said, "you keep designing this like a website. It needs to be edited like a film." That sentence reorganised the rest of the project.

You keep designing this like a website. It needs to be edited like a film.

The pacing problem

Music has a clock. Pages, mostly, do not. The trick was to give the page a clock the listener could feel without us announcing it. Aurora's keyframes — the very thing I'd been resisting in marketing pages for months — turned out to be exactly the right vocabulary.

The finished page averages 4:32 of attention. The industry benchmark, for what it's worth, is around 30 seconds. I'm still not sure how much of that is the music, the photography, or the timeline — but I think the answer is "all three, and they couldn't have worked without each other."