Berta Rojas 2010

Concept

This site carried Berta Rojas's international career through the years when that career truly became international: the years of Día y Medio with Paquito D'Rivera, of Tras las Huellas de Mangoré, of the Latin Grammy nominations. The calendar says it without embellishment: January at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, February recording with Paquito in Washington, March at the Austin Classical Guitar Society. All in one quarter.

For an artist who lives from that, the site is not a showcase: it is infrastructure. A festival programmer in Europe comes looking for three things —is she free on that date, how does she sound, who do I write to— and all three have to be one click away. The discography does not display covers: it plays the records, with the track list, the composer of each piece and links to buy. The reviews are quoted with name and outlet. And the press kits are the most professional piece of the set: two complete kits, downloadable in PDF and Word, in Spanish, English and French. That is not design: it is understanding how a European journalist works at nine at night before filing a piece.

White from floor to ceiling, small-caps serif type and only three colours in the whole site. The home page is a single image: Berta sitting on the floor, cut out against the white, playing. Everything is built with that logic of an object on the void —the CDs are cases with the disc peeking out, the press kits are ring binders with their reflection— and nothing has a background: it is the visual equivalent of a guitar alone on stage. It is the previous generation of the site that is still in production, and putting them side by side is the best argument for the relationship: more than fifteen years with the same artist.