Favorite Music 2025

An interactive list of my favorite music releases of 2025.

Tech Stack

• Astro
• Svelte
• Tailwind
• Docker

Design

I wanted to go for a 70s theme with a retro font and a warm color scheme. I ended up using Cooper*, which is a really nice modern implementation of the Cooper typeface. I went with a brown and sepia color scheme, with colorful accents.

I designed the elements of the UI to be slightly dimensional and rounded, to give the impression of a solid object with lighting. This helps certain elements such as the menu button stand out against the background.

Data

For the album data, I used Astro content collections, which is basically a simple immutable database. The entries are sorted into categories and listed alphabetically.

Each album has an associated embed link, which lets the site generate either a Bandcamp or YouTube embedded player when the user presses play on the release.

Interactivity

The user can play every release on the list by clicking the play button on the album artwork. This opens an embedded player in the menu. There are some limitations to this approach, especially that the user must press play in the embedded player before the music starts. It was also difficult to match the styling of the embedded player to the rest of the website, and get it to work with animations. However, I was able to hide and show the player without stopping the playback. The state of the music player is stored in a Svelte store, so multiple components can easily access it.

The menu also includes an option to switch between a light and dark theme. This mechanism uses cookies to store the user’s preference, so if they leave and return to the site, their preference will be remembered.