Dafne's new website
Dafne Records is a contemporary independent record label that straddles the worlds of underground dance music and experimental vocal electronica. We were approached to deliver a performant marketing website for the label to showcase its artists, the so called "soundscapes" and overall brand vision, with the ability for administrators to edit and update content as needed.
Since this project involved the integration of many moving parts, libraries and a heavy dose of custom designs, we decided to go the JS route. The main site is built using React framework Next.js, hosted on Vercel, which provides out-of-the-box benefits such as hybrid, static and server rendering as well as smart bundling, with a great mix of performance and SEO. NextAuth is leveraged for authentication and authorization.
As the main styling library, we defaulted to Tailwind, our favorite tool for rapid prototyping that also allow us to reduce our CSS bundle size in production. Content management is achieved via DatoCMS, a headless content management system with an easy-to-use GraphQL API and benefits such as a preview mode. Framer Motion ensures that the animation-heavy designs can be implemented without sacrificing performance or code cleanliness, by providing a declarative API for animations and transitions.
Building a musical NFT marketplace
We created the NFT marketplace where users have the ability to buy, sell and interact with audible NFTs which are minted by an admin. Admins must accept a user’s application to the platform before they are able to manage the NFT marketplace. This required 3 important tools : a music library, a blockchain connection and a smart contract processor.
To fetch music data programmatically and reduce overhead for admins who are editing content, we relied on the Spotify API. The Ethers.js library was chosen to interact with the Ethereum blockchain. Then, Solidity intervenes to write the smart contract in line with the ERC721 standard, and Truffle/Ganache are called for local blockchain testing.
Our approach to Dafne's website and the musical NFT marketplace underscores our commitment to cutting-edge technologies and creative ideas. Building these solutions has proven relevant and useful for Dafne as they provide an innovative and efficient platform to build engagement with their community. It's always a delight when clients grant us the resources and freedom to blend creativity with high-end tools.
