Jaq the Voice

Jaq the Voice is a spoken-word artist, and the site was built to hold a body of work that exists in several forms at once — written text, recorded audio, and video.

That combination is genuinely awkward to design for. Poetry and lyrics need to be readable as text, with line breaks and spacing intact, because the shape on the page is part of the work. Performance needs to be heard. Video needs room to play. A site that privileges one form flattens the others, and spoken word in particular loses most of its meaning when reduced to a transcript in a narrow column.

The structure gives individual works their own pages rather than pooling them into a single archive. Named pieces — among them Wakeful Dreaming, In the Dark, I Can Fly, Ride, and Out of Love — are treated as discrete works, alongside a recorded speech, All Power to the People. A collected section covers poetry, lyrics, and selected writings for anyone reading through the body of work as a whole, and a videos section carries the performance material.

Treating each piece as its own page matters for an artist. Individual works are what get shared, linked, and referenced; a single scrolling archive gives an admirer nothing specific to point at. It also means each piece can be found directly rather than only through the artist’s name.

Custom HTML content sections were used where standard page templates could not preserve the typographic requirements of the written work — necessary when the line breaks are not decoration but the piece itself.

This project is presented from an archived capture. The original site is no longer live at its own domain, so the archive link is a design reference rather than an active artist site.