eVinyl

A visit to a record store is motivated by a sense of nostalgia and curiosity — passionate vinyl collectors will spend hours in the store, flipping through the meticulously organized collections, looking at the art, photos, design, and texture of the vinyl itself. They will pick up an album that intrigues them, not always and not necessarily a new release by a current author, sometimes an old release, the music they listened to a couple of decades ago, and now rediscovered.

eVinyil tries to replicate the experience of visiting a record store on your screen. Takes you back to the time when you listened to entire albums — not playlists — when music and cover artwork were still an inseparable package and a complete experience.

The site offers pre-curated collections of music, that you can flip through, pick a title and place the needle on the vinyl.

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Of course, this experience cannot be compared to visiting a real store, however, all these "unnecessary" details send a message to users that the creators of this service have great respect for that unique, almost religious ritual of visiting the store.

With my design solution, I tried to use the limitations of different devices as an advantage. I used responsive design and the square format of the vinyl cover — if you were to scale the browser, instead of empty space on the screen, you would get an animation of the record coming out of the cover or going back in. The animation of the record player and the flipping of the records on the shelf are additional details that should mimic the real-world experience.