Paulo Gazela site design by Guilherme - Content first

Paulo Gazela is a talented musician living in Campinas, Brazil. He sings, plays the harmonica and composes for several musical projects he runs, mostly on Blues.

He has a very rich experience playing with leading musicians like Brazil-wide famous Flavio Guimarães, harmonica player of Blues Etílicos and American harmonica player R.J. Mischo.

Also, Paulo Gazela happens to be an old friend if mine, and I was seriously honored when he chose me to rebuild his whole site from the scratch.

Building Paulo Gazela’s website was one of my greatest experiences on web design because, side by side with being a very demanding and important client, he is a very conscient one and because he has picked me in confidence, he left me do my job with plenty freedom.

I had the chance to do a site in a way that most clients wouldn’t allow me. I started by gathering all the data we needed for the project and I build an HTML only page, with no presentation at all. I explained him that “content is king” and “presentation is support” and we should start on content instead of presentation.

So, we worked all the way up from the content to the presentation and the he told me.

I was very confused at first, how is possible to build a site without thinking on the layout first, but as we went through the process, now I just can’t imagine how is possible to do it otherwise.

My point is, desing is support,. no matter how much a designer like his stuff. Doing layout before content is like spicing food before having the main ingredients.

On the presentation side, the graphic stuff, what he told me:

I am a bluesman, a great number of my influences come from black people who lived a century ago and worked on the cotton fields in the southern USA. I like them and respect them very much, but I am not a black man who ever worked on a cotton field.

My music is filled with those elements, but is also modern and current, I live and work on the 21st century, and my site should reflect this. It has to be a modern page that incorporates a some elements of the past.

So, the layout is very modern, and the pictures I took are of his real instruments, is what he uses to play. I think it ended up like a nice encounter of old and new, just like his music is.

And don’t forget to download the MP3’s on the sidebar and listen to then!