Mark Lanegan | Jen Hingley Creative

Knock on the door..

Mark Lanegan is known for his dark storytelling and distinctive artistry as a vocalist and musician. Alongside releasing music as a solo artist under his own name and as a member of bands such as Screaming Trees, he also became renowned for his collaborations with other artists, featuring on a total of over 500 tracks across the length of his career.

With such a rich and extensive back-catalogue and with some appearances going uncredited, fans who want track down everything he's ever appeared on are faced with a daunting task. Heavenly Records, [PIAS] and design agency Modern English were united in wanting to create a complete destination to bring Mark’s back catalogue into one single place for fans, which would in turn help to build his audience on Spotify and Apple Music.

Sadly Mark died in 2022, but hopefully this site can continue to allow people to delve deeply into a truly unique body of work.

Creating the archive

The first step was collaborating with Heavenly Records and PIAS to painstakingly put together Mark’s definitive discography, starting with the easier to track down records released with his own bands such as Screaming Trees and The Gutter Twins. To his work as a solo artist and long-standing collaborator with bands like Queens of the Stone Age. Then lastly, tracking down his collaborations with a long and almost never-ending list of artists.

This also meant collating detailed information around Mark’s role in each recording - varying from vocals to lesser known credits like production and violin. Additionally figuring out whether the album was available on Spotify and Apple Music or not.

This information was first put together as a spreadsheet and eventually became the database that would power the site.

Defining the experience

Although the spreadsheet we had would no-doubt prove interesting so some of Mark’s die-hard fans, figuring out how to best present the discography to users was the next challenge.

I used a combination of wireframing, user journey mapping and low-fidelity prototyping to explore different pathways for presenting the discography. Building an archive of curated playlists was one idea that won the support of Mark, Heavenly and [PIAS], alongside grouping tracks by mood, by collaborator and by album.

Whilst existing as an extensive retrospective of Mark’s work, the site also sought to support the release of his new album ‘Someone’s Knocking’, and encourage Mark’s listeners to engage with his catalogue on Apple Music and Spotify, with sharability and user playlist generation being a way to help users make the experience their own.

Creating the User Interface

With the user interface of the site came a unique opportunity to try and translate the hallmarks of Mark’s musical style into a distinctive look and feel. The opportunity also came to tie the site in to the promotional campaign of the new album, therefore elements including the door knocker on the cover were utilised to form the entrance into ‘The Vault’.

Crafting an atmosphere

The dark, sultry style of the page designs and interactive menu were put together with the objective of helping users to feel immersed in the mood of Mark’s music, and to compliment the feel of the audio that could be played back in-browser.

The more nuanced aspects of the interactive experience, such as the entrance to the site and menus were prototyped ahead of being handed over to development and refined in-situ.

Mark Lanegan - The Vault

Knock on the door..

Creating the archive

Defining the experience

Creating the User Interface

Crafting an atmosphere