When it comes to classical music artist management HarrisonParrott are at the forefront. In 2010 we had the privilege of redesigning and developing their website – a site that was loved by the client and their peers and competitors.

Two years on, although the site still stood up against its competition, it was felt it was time to give the website a new lease of life, with a fresh design and some additional functionality.

The site was already full of engaging content and stunning photography, which made it a real pleasure finding a simple, stylish design to frame it all.

But we didn’t stop there. We created a carousel, which gave the client ultimate freedom to change images as well as feature site content such as relevant news and new artist signings.

The news section was revamped so that there is a hierarchy of content, and again here the client has the ability to change the order so that the focus is not always on just the latest item.

As well as added control and flexibility, we also integrated a series of players (including an HTML5 verison), so that all audio and video content played on iPads (extremely important as the artist managers like to use these to showcase their roster for potential bookings), mobile and desktop browsers.

All of which made for a great showcase at the IAMA industry conference in Budapest last month!

Original site post

As part of our ongoing work with Maxxium UK, we have been working with their wonderful Mixxit team to redesign and develop a new website. 

Mixxit is the brainchild of celebrity mixologist Wayne Collins. Along with his colleagues Andy Gemmell and Patsy Christie they set-up Mixxit initially as a training and education programme, with the aim of inspiring bartenders to make quality mixed drinks and cocktails. But they are so passionate that every drink can be perfectly made whether you are in the bar and or at home with friends, they wanted to spread their knowledge. 

Mixxit is unique in that every drink can be perfectly made in 5 easy steps. So how could we give people access to over 300 delicious cocktail recipes as well as offering guidance from three of the most prominent drinks experts in industry?  

Welcome to the Interactive Cocktail Mixer; you can search by spirit, occasion, glass, mixer or even colour in your quest to find the perfect drink. The cocktail mixer is built in Flash but utilises the site’s search functionality to find the right cocktail. Happy mixxing!

A lovely project for a great client.

We’ve been working with The Open University to develop some accessible, interactive content about the periodic table of elements for its Open Learn site.

Open Learn exists to provide free access to Open University learning materials. It is effectively an interesting, useful and “gentle” introduction to the world of Open University.

This periodic table content was developed to coincide with the International Year Of Chemistry. As with all Open Learn content the brief was to be interesting and informative and not to assume too much prior knowledge on the part of the target user.

Rather than develop a single interactive environment our approach was to break the learning objectives down into a series of single topic applications. These include an introductory video piece about the history and importance of the periodic table, “elements that changed the course of history”, “elements of the world”, and “body chemistry”.

To the extent that it was possible we wanted to recreate the immersive experience of the best science shows, where learning is achieved through interaction with single-topic experiments and displays.

We used rich imagery and illustrations to bring the periodic table to life and capture the imagination of the user. The navigation and hierarchy were both kept very simple and intuitive to allow easy access to the different applications. This simple approach allows the user to lightly browse topics or, if they prefer, delve deeper into the hard facts and data of the periodic table.

The following technologies were used to develop the apps…

HTML5 Video – By using the HTML5 <video> tag we made sure that the multimedia content in the application would be 100% compatible with the iPad and other mobile devices.

CSS3 – CSS3 was used to create interactive elements on the pages like the buttons – allowing us to reduce the number of assets (images) on the page. It was also used to create new animations and transitions supported on modern browsers

jQuery – jQuery was used through the site to allow users to interact with the data on the pages, and provide support for older browsers that don’t support CSS3 animations. Plugins such as jQueryUI and jQuery Reflections were used to add these effects. jQuery Scrollpane was used to support iPad style page scrolling.

It was a joy to work with the OU team on this project. The teaching staff should definitely write a book on this stuff if they haven’t already. Most of the really interesting content and periodic table facts that “make” these apps came from them.

Have a play. And learn.

When our pals at The Leith Agency decided to create their own Leith beer brand we jumped at the chance to wade in and lend our support. The result of months of late nights and extra hours is the Maid of Leith – a beer brand based around the soon-to-be famous daughter of Leith. She’s a feisty little minx that stands for everything known and loved about Leith – she’s tough, she’s irresistible and she’s got mare charm than you can shake a Water of Leith fish at.

Designed by Charlie and built by Paul, we created a website that concentrates on the beautiful label design – a large bottle that you scroll down to view, caressing every inch of the Maid in all her glory. Using some nice CSS styling touches along the way to bring her to life. We also set up a Twitter and Facebook pages for the Maid’s fans.

So, next time you’re out and about in the Leith locals grab yourself a bottle of our delicious ‘Maid in Leith’ brew and get yourself acquainted to the Maid’s treasure chest for yourself. You’ll be seeing it popping up in numerous reputable drinking establishments including The King’s Wark, The Shore, Fishers, Sofi’s, Beets and Valvona & Crolla.

Stories abound of server crashes caused by Stephen Fry tweeting links to good causes.

Well he hasn’t crashed YouTube, but he has tweeted a link to a new Young Scot film that Blonde (for which read David Hartmann) co-created with our sister PR agency Stripe.

The Storify below tells the story of the immediate aftermath of “the tweet”. You know when you’ve been “Fry’ed”.

Blonde is delighted to announce the launch of our latest creation – a great new website for Mint Hotel. We earned the opportunity to work with Mint Hotel (formally City Inns) across their extended digital strategy after a competitive pitch at the beginning of the year and have been beavering away creating the best possible boutique hotel website possible. Phase 1 went live yesterday with more nice functionality and content to follow soon. We’re really proud of the site – check it out at www.minthotel.com

I gave this presentation a full 30 undistracted minutes this morning.

It was 30 minutes very well spent.

Paul Adams, who spends much of his time at Google looking at how social networks actually work, has put together 220 or so slides that walk you by the hand through some of his most important findings. He has also, kindly, taken the time to fully annotate the slides with explanatory text.

He explores the differences between how our networks work offline, and how this contrasts with the often counter-intuitive behaviours that are imposed on us by the design and functionality of online networks.

Paul describes himself as a “Design Strategist” and so the presentation applies the networking insights to generate recommendations for designing for real-world networks.

Illuminating stuff that has helpfully moved my thinking on for a couple of live client projects.

His blog looks pretty interesting too.

We’ve had the pleasure of working with Burness LLP and Leithal Thinking for the last 5 months on the new Burness identity and website which launched yesterday.

The website features video profiles, staff blogs and a brand animation that we created to introduce the brand and reinforce the Burness ethos.

The new brand is borne out of conversations with the firm’s clients, intermediaries and staff to find the values that define the brand.

Philip Rodney, chairman of Burness LLP, said: “We have listened carefully to our clients and intermediaries in positioning our business as we continue through challenging economic times.  We have an ambitious and clear vision of who we are and where we want to be.  We just need to turn up the volume.  Our new brand identity will be important in helping us do this.  Our new brand is much more than a logo; it is the foundation of all our relationships.  It is a belief in how we do business and the effectiveness of the work that we produce.  Our promise is to cut through the noise and clutter and be committed to achieving what success looks like for our clients.”

The launch day of the website saw 1,998 visits (almost 8 times the normal visits) and the average time on the site was almost double.

Congratulations and thanks go to Burness for being a great client with a strong vision and confidence to embrace a new identity and website.

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