New project: Lit Tapes

Over the weekend I built a new little site that’s been on my mind: Lit Tapes! I read a couple books in the past few months that heavily featured music throughout the plot, and thought it would be fun to create playlists for those books.

I’ve told myself “no more forever projects”, but I just can’t seem to help myself. In any case, I don’t foresee updating this site frequently—just whenever I happen to read a story that celebrates music.

The index is a grid of cassette tape illustrations that match the color scheme of the book covers:

I created an SVG illustration that gets embedded for each post. The SVG include references post-specific colors stored in a data file for each post. There’s a deco property that defines whether the particular cassette should get stripes, a top band of color, or a bottom band of color. I decided to do that manually since the right aesthetic depends on the book cover.

Also in the post data are light and dark color schemes for each book:

These are also based off the book cover scheme.

That’s about it! You can poke around in the code on Github. Any musically-oriented books I should read next? Please file an issue and let me know!