last month i put in some work redesigning and updating some-assembly-required.net, the website for a radio show that exclusively plays recordings which somehow sample from other recordings. the show is hosted by jon nelson, who also makes audio collage under the name "escape mechanism". jon was so pleased with my work on the SAR site that he asked me to work on escape-mechanism.com.

escape-mechanism.com was originally designed a few years ago by lloyd dunn of the tape-beatles. the original design used frames, which admittedly was the only way to pull off such a design at the time. i was tasked with stripping out the frames (but keeping the appearance and functionality as similar as possible) and otherwise altering the site so that jon could update it. (it hadn't been updated in a year.)

the transition wasn't perfect—IE6 and earlier don't support position:fixed, which is the current way to fix things onscreen as opposed to frames, so i had to include a hack for the code to even work in IE (and it still doesn't work perfectly), but it looks great in firefox. on the other hand, there were some parts of the old site that didn't scale well, because 1027x768 was big back then. those parts now look much better on my 1280x1024 monitor.

check out the site if you like, listen to the mp3s, and watch the video. there's also a new video which is set to premiere on (i believe) the 16th, so keep an eye out for that, too.¶