Zajno Playlists

Brand
Zajno
Timeframe
4 months
Zajno role
Idea, concept, art direction, product design, UI, UX, animation, engineering
Full-cycle website creation
Awards
FWA x 1
Awwwards x 2
CSS x 4

A not-at-all-crappy music project

“Crappy Explanation” is an extravagant name shared by a number of music playlists put together by Zajno Crew members and other talented artists with the sole purpose of sharing good tunes with everyone. In the three years since the start of the project, we've accumulated so many digital mixtapes that clearly it was time to tidy them up into a neat website, which we did using such technologies as Three.js, GSAP, GLSL, WebGL & Hammer.JS. The website became FWA Of The Day on March 21, 2021.

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The aesthetic of an 80s vinyl records store

As usual, our goal isn’t just to create a website — we always seek to reflect the nature of the project. In the case of Crappy Explanation, our goal can be best described as tidying up in a quirky, vintage record store, putting the old vinyls in their boxes and organizing them by genres. That’s right, we like to compare our playlists to a set of one’s favorite LP’s, complete with wear and tear from frequent use. Inspired by the aesthetic of an 80s vinyl records store, we focused on recreating the corresponding textures, behaviours and sounds to deliver a realistic effect.

The mystery of the weird name

What’s so crappy about our explanations? We wondered that, too. Once upon a time, when Zajno was an infant, we worked with a very expressive and unpredictable client, whose decisions were changing more often than called for. And on one glorious, sunny day, after our email #1,265, we got a response “Leave that crappy explanation to yourself”. “What a gem” — we thought. Since then, this expression kind of stuck with us, and we decided to call our playlists that way.

“Do you know the feeling when you find a brilliant track and want to share it with your friends? Well, that has always been the case for us. So we thought why not make it our thing? And why just keep it to ourselves? Maybe others will find it as inspiring as we do? That's how and why we started this project.”

Sasha Turischev, Founder and CEO at Zajno

Result

What is the result?

Won FWA Of The Day on March 21, 2021
Recreated the atmosphere of a vintage vinyl records store with the help of 3D, sound and textures
Reflected the project’s nature through the aesthetic of the 80s
Gained deeper knowledge of working with 3D assets and Three.js library
Managed to make a symbiosis of 3D scene and markup
Won 4 trophies on CSS Design Awards and 2 trophies on Awwwards