Jim Coudal & The Pixies

Jim Coudal, a long-time member of the Movable Type community and principal at Coudal Partners, sent me an email to let me know about the work they've done for pixiesdiscs.com. Though Jim and his team have designed a number of great sites with Movable Type, this one's close to my heart, having been a fan of the Pixies since high school.

While we've enjoyed the success that Six Apart has had, one of the most satisfying parts of watching blogs mature has been seeing the successes of the people who've been doing creative work over the past few years. If you're into web design, you probably know of great work Coudal Partners has done over the years, including projects like Photoshop Tennis.

Especially great is when the stuff we do overlaps with things near and dear to our hearts (in my case, working with one of my favorite bands.)

Since Coudal Partners has been such an influence to me as a designer, I wanted to ask Jim a few brief questions and give him an opportunity to plug the cool stuff he's been working on.

MT: What's the favorite site you've worked on in the past few years?

JC: Aside from coudal.com, my favorite site to develop was the jewelboxing site since it involved not only designing and building the site but also creating the brand, identity and business model from scratch. When you are your own client it is only you who can say "make the logo bigger!". Also, from a look and feel standpoint, we like the general site for our other company, The Show. It's quite a bit different from most of the sites we have built and visited and maybe it's because we're getting older and our eyesight is failing but the huge text makes an impact and is easy to read.

MT: How did you get started switching from print to the web?

JC: We never switched, we still do a lot of print work and we have made a conscious effort to apply the knowledge and craft of traditional typography and structured layout techniques that we use on posters, package design and other print communication to our web building. We see it as all part of the same thing.

MT: What's the biggest evolution you've seen in the design community?

JC: I guess probably the speed with which styles and techniques travel and the immediate feedback we receive from people when we launch a new project. We're glad to see that we're not the only ones constantly pursuing clarity. These days we're all about stripping away. Fewer words in our copy, fewer lines in our designs.

The web had something to do with it, of course, or maybe it was just the last ten years or so in general. The scope and breadth of information suddenly available on demand required a new approach to its presentation. Cleaner, simpler, easy to use. And pretty. We reject the idea that ugliness is the price of usability. That's just dumb.

MT: How did you get involved with the Pixies -- both the shirt design, the shows and the site?

JC: The whole story is pretty well told in this recent profile.

As for the merchandise design, the band was really happy with the work we did for the discs from the 2004 tour and asked us if we could help them reinvent a design system for their current tour. Since we're huge fans we said yes before they were finished asking. It's been a great project and one that particularly fits the skills of the studio and it has allowed us to control a large amount of material so that the entire presentation is unified.

You'll be able to see it represented best by purchasing one of our recordings of the current tour.