Chronological Line-up Test Page

Everyone check out:
[bandtoband.com] http://bandtoband.com/index.php?Page=Kiss
and let me know what you think. I've been trying to get a functional timeline layout for some time now and I think this is a good as it can get. There has been a great deal of internal wrangling about whether or not all immediately affiliated releases should be included as well, not just the ones whose release year coincides with the main band, but I've come to the conclusion that the timeline page is meant to display the releases of the primary band and that you can get quickly flooded by related releases in many cases which would distrupt the flow of the intent of the page.

Also, I realize that the line-up for 1988's "Smashes, Thrashes & Hits" runs into the side bar but I've thrown every trick I know at it and still I can't get it to format differently. I've pretty much run out of HTML stunts I can pull to get it to fit properly. Oh well.


Kevin

Well, I know you've put quite a bit of work into this Kevin, so I'm sorry to say that I don't like it at all :(

First, when I want to know the chronological releases for a band, I'm really uninterested in what releases other bands made during those years, when said other bands happened to share a member with this band. The presence of those other releases is really jarring. I'd take them out completely. If they're in, then you should have ALL immediately related releases in there (because the "coinciding with the main band's release year" distinction is completely non-obvious) but you'd have to totally rework the layout of the page in order for it to make any sense at all without, as you said, "flooding" you. But as I said, I think it's much better to take them out completely.

I find having the lineup above an album and then continuing a vertical line as far as necessary fairly unusable as well. In the case of long static periods in the lineup, I have to scroll way up (and be careful not to miss any lineup changes as I'm doing so!) in order to see what the lineup for a particular album is. Much better would be to simply list the lineup alongside the album, as you do with an individual album's page (and as bnrmetal.com does). If a lineup remains constant, you'll get a lot of the same listing moving along. If you wanted, you could color-highlight members on joining/leaving (red for leaving and green for joining, or whatever). But that's possibly too distracting; just printing normal text color would be OK.

Putting the albums from the same year into boxes for that year is OK, although I think putting the release year below an album (as you do on the single-album pages) is equally good, and is maybe better in the cases where there are gap years between releases (if you do it the way it is now, then it seems weird to have a "vertical timeline" with boxes that touch representing years which do not touch).

All in all, I think doing something almost exactly like the current single-album page, but with many albums on it, would be not only consistent with the rest of the site (a big plus) but far more usable than this design.

I hope some of that feedback is useful :(

Don't listen to him, I think it looks excellent.

I think the layout is just fine overall but do have a couple of suggestions over style and content.

I think the inconsistency of the 'related bands' display defines that it's not really a good idea, sorry. For example, Vinnie Vincent was in Treasure releasing an album in '77. Would it be any more or less meritorious of mention if it had been '76 or '78? If it were the last album on which he featured before joining Kiss or the first after his departure, maybe there's a chronology worth showing but, again, not if it has to coincide with recording activity by the main band in question. And then there's the fact that members are equally likely to drift off to solo ventures and a misleading inference could be drawn that their next effort was in a group with this next listed recording.

I'm really not fussy if every release has the memebers listed or just when there's a change, actually - I quite like the *this marks a change* feature of the line-up being listed.

I'm also slightly (off-topic I know) confused by the appearance of the 4 solo albums here? I know they had the Kiss logo on them but they are by definition, and by having only 1 member, solo albums (hence the later compilation 'Best of Solo Albums'). This too seems not to be a group effort but exactly what it says.

Finally, excuse my ignorance on Kiss-related matters, but why are Stanley and Simmons the only members listed for the compilation labum 'Chikara'? And, if that's correct; additionally, does that album with its glitchy line-up show a weakness in including such oddities as 'Best Of's, the solo albums and the like as they distort the apparent flow of membership: by this I mean Bruce Kulick didn't leave Kiss in '87 to rejoin in '88 after Chikara but that's what appears to be implied by the timeline? Nor did all members leave in '78 bar Gene while he did his solo album, then he left as only Ace rejoined ... etc etc ...

Sorry - not meant to be -ve - hope that's of use.

First, a note on the Kiss "solo" albums... They have always been considered Kiss albums by the fans and, more importantly, the band. In every interview in which Gene or Paul says, "Kiss has _x_ albums," the solo albums are always counted. Several of the songs appear on best-of compilations and at various times the band has performed the tunes live. Additionally, the band's promotional material always includes the albums. Really, they're considered to be Kiss albums on which one band member played with non-Kiss musicians, not pure solo albums. As a Kiss follower for most of my life and a contributor to the files that eventually gave birth to www.kissfaq.com I believe that I am qualified to make that claim.

What you see in our Kiss listing is my virtual Kiss collection. At one time, I had the first pressings (including all inserts) of all those records. I sold all my music years ago but thought it would be fun to recreate the collection here. In doing so, I definitely pushed the rules to the limits.

As you point out, including multi-lineup releases can be a troublesome thing in a chronological display such as this, just as displaying a non-chronologically released recording can be (for instance, "Static Age" by The Misfits was recorded in '78 but released in '97, at which point only one member of the band was left in the then-current lineup). We've got a number of ideas about how to deal with that and I'd definitely like to hear what all of you think, but some of the perceived problems depend on our expectations: Is it a chronological listing of a band's releases? Is it a chronological listing of a band's lineups? Or is it a hybrid of the two?

I like that nobody has pointed out the most fun "error" of all, right there in the first sentence on that page.

One idea might be to use the far right side of the display for multi-lineup compilations instead of related releases. That way the multi-lineup albums wouldn't conflict with the master lineup listings and the overall display wouldn't selectively include some related releases but not others.

Bah ... Metallica, Kiss, S-Club 7 - who can be bothered to tell the difference anyway? ;-)

I noticed the "Metallica" right away but figured it wasn't part of the "page layout" issues I was responding to, so it wasn't worth commenting on.

I think the focus of a listing should be on albums, not lineups, because everything else on this site is focused on albums. If a band changes lineups without making a new studio recording, for example, we don't currently put it in the tree here, because we put albums in the tree. If you wanted to be focused on lineups, the only way to do it IMO would be to should a timeline of ALL lineups the band went through, including ones that produced no releases, and then indicate when a particular lineup recorded an album. I think that's too much work to do, too hard to confirm the data on, and too hard to easily display concisely. Better to just do a chronological listing of albums.

Oh, and Matt, if you don't agree with my earlier comments, feel free to say why you don't think some of my complaints are actually problems, but just saying "don't listen to him" is a bit dismissive :(

Don't listen to him, he doesn't like "dismissive". ;-)

I'll agree that the page isn't perfect due to a number of outstanding issues:

1. PK is right about losing track of long static line-ups. Having to follow the trail back up the line to find the associated line-up for an album is problematic. It is missing the key element that I believe the Family Tree offers, a good deal of information that is understandable at a glance.

2. The associated releases has been plaguing me for some time. I thought it a good idea to show a chronological relationship of a band with it's immediately related releases but have never been happy with how it's turned out. I was trying to squeeze out the full use of available space but that is easier said than done.

I'm not enthusiastic about BNRMetal's layout. It is functional to be sure however it doesn't show relationships between albums. My aim is to somehow present the evolution of membership in a band over time and for that reason want to logically group stable line-ups together so that the layout makes it intuitive when a line-up change occurs. BNR does that with bolding individual names but that is not optimal in my opinion mainly because one would have to constantly maintain the highligting paradigm if the band is still active. The system should be able to handle such a mundane task (maybe BNR does, I don't know). However there is no association between stable multi release line-ups which is a weakness in my opinion. I tried resolving that with the line connections but that did not work out it seems.

I also think there could be some sort of improvement on a BNR style layout in terms of offering additional related information so that the band's relationship to the network could somehow be embedded into the layout, hence my attempt to add the related releases. I'd still like to do something along this line but am not sure where to go from here.

Finally a BNR layout would be almost redundant versus the curent listing of releases for a band. Theoretically it could simply replace the current display of releases for a band however I'm also concerned about making pages on the site super saturated by offering too much information on a single page. For example if a BNR style layout were to be implemented on the main band page it would fight for attention along with the family tree listing. This may not seem such a bad thing, information density is always desirable, but I don't want huge pages requiring long scrolling to get to a different part of the page. If I'm zooming through family tree branches (one of my favorite things to do on the site) I don't want t to have to wade through a page or two of chonological line-ups to get down to the family tree every time. If I want that information I'll actively seek it out, I don't want it forced upon me. This point on the quantity of different information presented on a single page can be argued for some time but in my desired presentation of the various pages I don't want long scrolling pages of varied information (long single family trees I can live with) and I'm probably going to stick to my guns on this one unless someone could present a very strong arguement to the contrary.

Anyway, I still want some sort of chronological display for bands but I might have to go back to the drawing board and try something different.


Kevin