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

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.