Tocotronic Website

Some notes and a line graph regarding the website for German rock band Tocotronic.

The ecosystem of a rock band (or any kind of active musician or artist) drawn as a line graph looks something like this:

When you’re working on a band website, you have to take this into account. A strategy you can see quite often is separating a regular artist website from temporary promotional microsites supporting record releases. Sometimes it’s just news on band sites, pointing to an external URL somewhere on the label’s website. And sometimes, artist websites change radically from release to release.

Although we find the idea of reinventing very fascinating, we wanted to do something slightly different when we were asked to design the website for our friends of German rock band Tocotronic. The question was: how can we create a comprehensive informative website for fans where they can easily stay up to date and dig in more archive-oriented information that grows over the years but still keep the freedom to work with release specific concepts and visual languages?

The approach we have chosen is an elegant XHTML and CSS architecture, where content and functionality are strictly separated from their presentation. In this way, we can keep the overall layout and structure of the general artist website, but are easily able to add the characteristic flavors that are coming with a record release straight to the homepage. There’s nothing groundbreaking about this, but it didn’t feel that appropriate to us for any of our projects so far.

This is how the first iteration of the Tocotronic Website looked like in 2007 for their record “Kapitulation” with its characteristic Black and bright Green combination:

And the current version of the website looks like this – on the lines of the lightweight design with a solid red accent:

We’ll see what will happen for the next record.

By the way, as for Kapitulation in 2007, we’re currently working on all the online and offline artwork and promotion work for Tocotronic’s upcoming record called Schall & Wahn. We’ll show something here as soon as we’re done with it.