Wynn Holmes
wynnholmes.com

Paris/NYC/Montréal
2017

Website Design
UI/UX

Role: Lead Designer
Agency: Optimistic Future
Developed by Little Fragments

In creating a nuanced user experience for renowned choreographer, Wynn Holmes, rhythm and melody are visualized in a way that reflects the folding and contorting characteristics of her choreography. Combining a mutual love of jazz, a system of proportions derived from the chromatic scale was used to create a musical division of space, providing a modularly responsive structure for the site's content areas.

Chosen as the primary musical reference, Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage mirrors the complex, yet effortless gestures of Wynn's choreography. The subtle distances between the notes of the signature and unusually colored C#min13 chord are related to Robert Bringhurst's proprietary chromatic scale for the creation of page proportions, as found in his seminal work The Elements of Typographic Style. Establishing the square (1:1) as the root note, each remaining note is assigned a rectilinear shape proportional to its chromatic distance from the root note. These shapes are sequentially overlapped, creating a melodic series of musical divisions. 

Incorporating the human gesture, the upper corners of each initial chromatic shape are lowered to meet the intersection with the next shape in the sequence. The bottom vertices are then inverted, creating the illusion of a turning figure. The resulting musical interaction between form, space and image provides a choreographed experience that illuminates the content in a manner that is distinctly relevant to Wynn’s body of work.

Copyright © Jaymes Moore 2011–2020