Website: fifth-music-com

fifth music & sound design is Matthias Hacksteiner. He basically does – you’ll be surprised – everything that’s connected to sound: sound branding as well as compositions for motion graphics or different video formats. Recently he even finished his first album.
While his album was produced under the alias amongst giants he needed an identity for his company fifth music & sound design to give his professional work a proper appearance and setting.

fifth is a musical expression describing the sequence of five consecutive notes. That became the foundation for the identity developement. In addition to that the musical system is based on five stave which led me to extend the five circles into rounded lines.
For the typography I tried to quote the appearence of musical symbols like “forte fortissimo”, “piano” or “mezzoforte” but kept it a bit more quiet…

I also wanted to connect to the modern and innovative sounds fifth is producing for his clients with the clean subline and the different translations.

To complete the identity I generated (based on the number 5) some key visuals for being used in modern media implementations. Starting with a CD/DVD label I also used them as a random background-element on the website or for animated graphics. Since they are quite a nice eye-catcher they could also be very well used for t-shirts, caps, stickers et cetera in the future.

For the showreel I brought the logotype and the generated lines to life to create a simple opener, outro and separator. The sound (from fifth music & sound design of course) underlines the animations very well!

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

Using type on websites has always been quite a pain in the neck for me. Implementing custom typefaces with flash (sIFR) might seem like a proper solution but there are often problems displaying them – particulary since the adblock plus extension for Firefox is gaining more and more importance (which I think is totally right). So for the fifth music website I used a technology that was totally new to me: typeface.js This is a font rendering script based on javascript and works out just fine!
The website is based on wordpress to let Matthias keep you up to date easily and write interesting stuff on his weblog. Have a look at www.fifth-music.com

Finally here are some close-ups from the printed matter to give you an idea of the great paper Matthias and I chose for his stationery.

Audio: Moneybrother – They’re Building Walls Around Us

Wanna see more? Since I had to finish my final degree Kathi did all the other (motion) graphics and I somehow acted as Art Director…

Audio: Matthias Hacksteiner / fifth music