The new Harrison Parrott website went live at the end of last month.

Harrison Parrott (”HP” to their friends) are one of the world’s leading classical music artist and project management agencies. As we have discovered they are also a highly principled, ultra-professional, appreciative and engagingly eclectic group of people.

The new site is the product of a rigorous development process that included Scenario Planning, persona creation and brand definition.

Scenario Planning is a proprietary tool that uses a combination of stakeholder workshops and spreadsheet number crunching to directly relate user goals to business objectives. This allows us to objectively prioritise functionality and content via a process that is jointly owned by all of the key decision makers.

The planning for this project included primary research amongst various audiences including orchestra promoters, record labels, journalists and musicians. These audiences presented us with a sometimes contradictory set of insights around attitudes to all things social, technology usage, and the role of agency websites in their professional lives.

The process of reconciling these insights has resulted in a site that is finely tuned (no pun intended) to be fit for commercial purpose whilst offering a clean, efficient and intuitive user experience.

It has also resulted in simple but innovative features such as a notebook facility that allows users to create a personalised list of artists as they browse the site. These lists can be saved, printed or shared by email via a unique link. The notebook is already proving to be a popular feature both within and outwith the agency.

So there you have it. We clearly enjoyed the project and working with the HP team. This is what they had to say about us.

“Impressed by their work for Sadler’s Wells, Edinburgh International Festival and Dilettante Music, we found Blonde to be an energetic and responsive agency. Their proposal for the redevelopment of our website was fresh and creative, but clearly focused on what we were trying to achieve. Asking the right questions to ensure they understood our business and our culture, they delivered – on schedule – a clean and striking site which is easy to use and features innovations that work for us and our users. We’re looking forward to continuing to develop our digital marketing strategy with this highly professional outfit.”

Antonio Orlando, Marketing and PR Manager

We had another website launch yesterday – Creative Scotland’s perspectives’ forum.

Creative Scotland (if you didn’t already know) will be a new organisation with creative practitioners at its heart: an organisation designed to listen to the needs of professional practitioners and use that intelligence in its role as advocate, champion, investor and broker.

It’s your chance to share your views on the opportunities as well as the obstacles for the creative community, for the individual, for the public and for Creative Scotland itself.

Over the next three months, they’ll be listening to your perspective on Creative Scotland’s four priorities: creative practitioners, accessibility, participation and international activity.

Creative Scotland has commissioned essays from the international creative community as a starting point to stimulate discussion. The first of these, the creative practitioner, was launched yesterday morning by visual artist Hans Abbing.

You can read his thoughts and submit your response on the site.

perspectives.creativescotland.org.uk

EdTwinge is a Twitter-based, crowdsourced, realtime Edinburgh Fringe rating application.

It monitors tweets that mention any of the acts at the 2009 Fringe Festival and/or the most commonly used Fringe hashtags. It then matches the content of these tweets against an extensive database of positive and negative words and phrases.

The site publishes two scores for each act at the Fringe. The first is “Noise”. This is simply the number of tweets that have mentioned the act in an Edinburgh/Fringe context. The second, and more important, measure is what we call “Karma”.

A full, geek-friendly explanation of how Karma is calculated can be found on the Edtwinge site. But basically it is a measure of the net positive sentiment about each act, which is based on a robust statistical analysis. This statistical analysis ensures that the Karma score is as reliable as possible. For instance an act mentioned in, say, five tweets, all of which are positive will have a significantly lower karma score than an act mentioned positively in 60 tweets out of 70. Phrases are prioritised over words, so “shit-hot” would be correctly identified as a positive statement for instance.

The top ten tables for the Fringe as a whole, and for each genre of show, are primarily derived from Karma. Noise only comes into play if two shows have the same Karma rating. In this instance the act with the higher noise score would rank above the other.

The site also allows the user to search and view karma and noise scores for any act, and to view in chronological order the verbatim tweets that underpin these.

EdTwinge is also the result of a garage-band style collaboration with some very talented, sparky and creative people.

Mike Coulter – social media exponent at Digital Agency (the original idea was his).

Andrew Burnett – another social media exponent and expert traffic driver.

Jim Wolff – digital misfit (his words not mine) who joined Leith part way through the project.

There is no paying client behind EdTwinge. It’s been a fun and fruitful diversion from the day job for those of us lucky enough to be involved. And what we’ve learned about tag-team style collaboration, baton-passing Twitter account shifts, and fleet-of-foot digital seeding and amplification has been as valuable as the technical, under the bonnet of Twitter stuff.

Early days yet (3 and a half days into the Fringe at the time of writing), but there has already been a significant amount of positive commentary and the site appears to be performing well. A big thank you to our friends at Stripe for securing some really excellent profile for the project.

I’ll post a more in-depth analysis of results and learning in a couple of weeks but average time on site is currently running at over 4 minutes on the back of an average of 5.22 pages viewed per visit according to Google Analytics.

Follow us (EdTwinge) on Twitter for regular updates. And/or embed your own EdTwinge Top 10 widget, like this one that we prepared earlier…

We’ve been working with Edinburgh International Festival over the last few months on a new site ‘Following the Diaspora: Chinese Lives in Scotland’. The site gives an intimate insight into the lives of Chinese people who have chosen to make Scotland their home, exploring memory and homecoming, as well as celebrating the lives of the Chinese Scottish Diaspora.

The website is made of work by the Scottish/Chinese artist, Pamela So. The project has taken Pamela from her home in North Ayrshire, Scotland, to her ancestral home in Shunde, Guangzhou, China, and back to the most northerly shores of Scotland in Caithness and Sutherland. The result is an interactive portrait of several individuals of Chinese descent who share their thoughts and experiences through text and multimedia, giving a sense of what it is like to live within two cultures.

Browse the Following Diaspora: Chinese Lives in Scotland website at eif.co.uk/diasporaproject

Dundee has long been known as the ‘City of Discovery’ – an identity that has been very beneficial to the city in terms of raising its profile locally, within Scotland and further afield. However this old branding for the city is now more than 20 years old and in need of a new look. Blonde has been working with our sister agencies, Leith and Stripe, on a new website www.dundee.com to support the relaunch of Dundee and its new branding, ‘One City, Many Discoveries’. The new vision, while still reflecting the city’s heritage, has been created to better represent modern, multi faceted Dundee: a diverse, creative and innovative city which is home to world leading research, a thriving digital sector and which offers a fantastic quality of life.

At the heart of our refreshed vision for Dundee are people who are linked to the city and their stories about it. A host of inspirational individuals including figures such as the actor Brian Cox and presenter Lorraine Kelly as well as scientist Sir Philip Cohen and local musician Ged Grimes have shared their personal discoveries about Dundee with us.

Through the website we’re inviting people to ‘discover more‘ about the city but we also want to unearth locals’ stories so we can share with these with everyone else. So through ‘Dundee & Me‘, we want to hear from the people who live or work or study in Dundee and find out what it is about the city that sparks their imagination. A selection of these stories will be published online and also in a new guide book to the city, and one story will be chosen as the subject of a new short film about Dundee.

thesixtyone.com has this lovely little growl style info panel to let you know what’s going on. This gives you great beginners tips , status updates, and also tells you if you’ve buggered something up. Just enough to be helpful and not too much to be a microsoft paperclip style pain in the arse.

Very nice. Very nice indeed.

I presented to the West Lothian eBusiness Group yesterday. The subject was Blogging for Business, based mainly on our own experiences here on the Blonde blog. A nicer, more appreciative audience you’d struggle to find.

It was also an opportunity to road test Prezi – a potential antidote to death by Powerpoint.

Prezi describes itself as the “zooming presentation editor”. It aims to avoid the linear narrative (stuck on rails) progression of Powerpoint by using a zooming approach to navigation. It really is a case of zooming pictures painting a thousand words because I won’t be able to do it justice by describing it here. The site is well worth a visit because the simple visual tutorials will quickly give you a good idea of what it’s all about. Basically, though, it avoids the use of slides by arranging the content of your presentation on an “infinite landscape”. You then progress through by zooming in and out

My Blogging for Business presentation can be viewed here. You can follow the path I created by clicking the next arrow, or zoom out using the magnifying glass and click on any element that interests you.

Based on the interactive tutorials I was able to get up to speed and put a presentation together in less than a morning. The main drawback, as far as I can tell, being that some elements of presentation structure are hard to change retrospectively. There’s an Undo button, but undoing everything after the component you want to change to get back to it can be frustrating to say the least. The secret, as with all presentations, is good planning before you start creating.

I have upgraded to a Pro account which gives access to a desktop version (the first presentation was put together on the Prezi site) and a huge amount of extra memory space on their site.

Well worth a look and a play.

This week we were delighted to be involved in the launch of the 2009 Edinburgh International Festival with the design and build of their new look website. The website showcases the ‘Enlightenment’ programme of events from 14 Aug – 06 Sep. It also showcases the new EIF brand and the newly commissioned (and slightly controversial) Edinburgh Toile by our friends in Glasgow, Timorous Beasties. (Not the Edinburgh Toilet as one of our developers mistakenly called it throughout production!)

Having worked closely with EIF for the 2008 Festival, we were keen to improve the usability of the site and make searching for events totally intuitive with both a general search and search using a diary mechanism.

The initial response to the new website has been fantastic and we’ve already got our eyes on events for when tickets go on sale on 04 Apr.

www.eif.co.uk

A week ago we set out our stall to provide live tracking of EdTwestival socialising as it happened.

The idea was to do this using a newly created Twitter account @wemet. By sending a direct message to WeMet with the Twitter @names of the people you met, you would help to create a real time database of all the social interactions as they happened.

That was the theory…

In practice in turned out pretty well. The EdTwestival event itself was an unqualified success – well organised, well supported and much appreciated by all who attended. By comparison the live tracking element was more of a mixed bag.

What worked

• Roy, Andy and Fraser did a grand job in a short space of time to grapple with the Twitter API, develop the application and sort out the front end interface.
• Excellent support for the idea ahead of the event from the EdTwestival team and the “community”.
• At the event itself there was a generous spirit and plenty of good intentions to participate in the idea.
• In the end, from a universe of 189, a total of 58 people sent direct messages detailing conversations with 118 others. These “meetings” involved 124 unique names or 66% of the universe. The resulting social graph of the event is shown in the image above and the movie below. You can also view a replay, condensed into 5 minutes, here.

What could have been better

• Despite the best efforts of the EdTwestival guys the venue wifi couldn’t cope with demand for bandwith resulting from the furious content creation of 200 avid twitter-bloggers. We ended up running the application through a 3G dongle that could only manage a 2G connection.
• A design that looked great on screen could have been better optimised for large scale projection.
• Despite the predictably high penetration of iPhones within this geeky group, many people simply weren’t packing the right kind of mobile devices to make participation easy.
• Even with an iPhone, sending a direct message at the start of every new conversation is actually an anti-social act. In the end, an idea that was enabled by technology was also limited by technology. More accurately, and reassuringly, the idea was limited by people’s desire to be socialising rather than technologising.

Nonetheless a big thank you to all who did “technologise”.

To retweet this post, copy and paste the text below into Twitter, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Twhirl, or twhatever.

Results of Wemet live tracking at #EdTwestival – http://bit.ly/yblG3

Hi all,

I thought it would be nice if we stuck our feet up for 5 minutes for a little chat about one of my favorite subjects Typography.

Come on, you love it! You do, you do, you do. You just might not know it. But what happens when it goes bad? How do we know if it’s bad? How many times have you been tripped up when reading your favorite publication (For me it’s Gardeners weekly, bushes and shrubs special edition) when, out of nowhere good crikey, a tricksy letter leaps out of the page and says “hi there, I’m down here being all out of place and ugly among all these pretty other letters”, or a rogue ‘O’ sits too near / far from a ‘P’ (or other straight sided character for that matter) and you just want to tumble dry a beaver in despair! And it’s not just the fake crappy ones like ‘comic-sans’ that are at it either, oh no! It seems that even the really really brilliant typefaces can have their own equivalent of ‘Christmas Jumpers’ tucked away at the bottom of their little typey closets. Ever noticed the disastrous Question Mark in Futura?, the odd protrubance and bulginess of the ascender on the lower case ‘f’ of Adobe Caslon Pro? or the, and my personal worst offender, descending Tail of the capital ‘R’ of Bembo (however, this point of view does sometimes upset people).

However, lovely people, help is at hand! Love him, really love him, hate him, entirely ambivalent of his existence on this good earth, or just plain don’t know him from a squished dormouse, Massimo Vignelli has published an amazing 96 page book on better understanding typography in graphic design. It must be stated that this book comes entirely from Mr. Vignelli’s opinion of a ‘better understanding of typography in graphic design’, and for those of you who do know Massimo from a squished dormouse will of course appreciate that he has rather opinionated.

The book gives specific details on Vignelli’s methodology and approach as well as how he decides on typefaces, grid systems, paper sizes and stock. Which is slightly ironic as the book is not out in print, but available as a PDF download here. It is well worth a peruse over a nice hot cup of tea, I assure you. Do make sure to look out for typos.

Bye Bye