dougrosenberg.com
A from-scratch Astro rebuild of the live dougrosenberg.com, deployed to Cloudflare Workers — custom, considered design and a specific brand concept instead of generic musician-site defaults.
This started as a deliberate rebuild-as-craft-exercise, not a "the live site needs this" project — two honest reasons drove it: wanting to work in Astro again after enjoying it on Haxbyte, and wanting to move further away from the typical AI-generated-site look. That second goal got written down as a concrete, checkable list rather than a vibe: no centered-hero-plus-two-buttons, no glassmorphism/gradient-mesh as the default "premium" treatment, no default system-ui/Inter-everywhere type, no every-card-the-same-rounded-corner treatment, no perfectly safe symmetric spacing. It has since replaced the previous Blazor build as the live site.
The nav is the clearest expression of that list: instead of a conventional top bar, a corner element holds five colored icons, one per section, scroll-tracked so the current section glows while the rest dim. Below 860px, where hover-to-reveal doesn't work and the nav is meant to stay secondary to the scroll anyway, it collapses to a single hamburger circle instead of trying to force the desktop treatment onto a touch screen.
A second layer sits on top of that base system: the debut album Better Than TV lends its wry, unpretentious voice to small details — a terminal-style "> listen now" prompt standing in for a waveform or play button, and hover tooltips over the hero saxophone photo that surface real track and album names (Goran Ivanovic Group, Underwater). Three additional hero prototypes explored further before this direction was locked in: a retro tabletop-TV frame around the hero photo with lead-sheet-style section labels (Intro/A/B/C/Coda), the same frame with an antenna accent, and a full-bleed graded photo with an expanding nav pill instead of the console frame.
AI-Tells, Named and Checked Against
The thing to avoid was written down as a specific, checkable list — centered hero + two buttons, glassmorphism/gradient-mesh, default system-ui type, uniform rounded-corner cards, safe symmetric spacing — rather than a vague "make it less generic" instruction that's impossible to verify against.
Corner Nav, Not a Top Bar
Five scroll-tracked icons in the corner replace a conventional nav bar, glowing to show the current section. It collapses to a single hamburger circle below 860px rather than forcing a hover-dependent desktop pattern onto touch.
Three Competing Hero Directions, Explored Live
Rather than mocking up alternatives offline, three full prototype pages (/preview-tv-leadsheet, /preview-shape-antenna, /preview-graded-expand) were deployed alongside the real index, so directions could be compared in a real browser before one was chosen.
