Endtopic

Fifty-four mixes and nowhere to put them

Endtopic is a radio station I have been feeding for years. Thirty-two podcast episodes and twenty-two guest sets, sitting on Mixcloud with no front door of their own.

The interface is one word

Most players are a strip of small controls asking to be read: a scrubber, a volume slider, a track list, a logo. I wanted the opposite. One screen, one colour, and the state of the thing spelled out at the size of a poster. play. pause.

The hint came from the type. I had fallen for Bandit, by All Caps Type.

Red does the work

A station needs to be recognisable in a browser tab, so the whole thing is one red. The second colour is never the same twice: every track draws an unused hue at red's own brightness and wipes it left to right as the mix plays. Progress as a field rather than a line, so you feel where you are without reading a number. Sixty-five hues for fifty-four mixes, so the colour never repeats.

An elephant that never forgets a track

I drew an elephant in headphones, vibing like there is no tomorrow. Six frames, one continuous line, no fill. He does the job of a status light: he dances while a track is playing and stops dead the moment you pause. He and the advancing colour are the whole readout, one for whether it is running and one for how far in. He is also the soft thing in a very loud room.