Inspired by invigorating contemporary classical music labels with her equally contemporary design work, designer Denise Burt wrote Seeing New Music: Contemporary Classical Music Through the Eyes of a Graphic Designer. Published in 2015, the book offers a collection of stories that delve into 24 of Burt’s album cover designs. However, Burt wanted to create an online version where she could add new stories, as well as enhance her published ones with streamed music. So she teamed up with designer and developer Bugge Lützhøft of design firm Ekranoplan, whom she shares a coworking space with at Republikken in Copenhagen; together, they began to bring her dream into reality. 

From the site’s initial sketches to its launch, Seeing New Music took about six months, with Lützhøft and Burt designing and programming it in stages. “Bugge made 95 percent of the structure in the first production week, so I started filling the content in straight away,” Burt says. “We had the luxury of fine-tuning the layout with most of the content in place.” Experimenting as they went along, many of the initial features the pair had envisioned had to be scrapped, including a navigation structure that would enable visitors to filter stories by different parameters. “After experimenting with that, we found that it was confusing for the user,” Burt explains. “So we simplified it and presented the content more like a conventional book.” 

Built from the ground up in WordPress, Seeing New Music features music streamed via Spotify and more than 160 images. A slide-up menu enables visitors to access the site’s content, and can be accessed in several ways. “[The menu is] perhaps a bit counterintuitive in certain places,” admits Burt. “But we wanted to be sure no one missed the content of the site.” To keep pages uncluttered, users can choose between a light box for the image content and a singular music player window. The easy-to-read format, combined with the examples of contemporary classical music, breathes a new life to Burt’s work.