Photography
Wow – what a ride! A little over a week ago, we got stuck into putting together visuals for the UK’s fastest rising country artist, Tim McKay, and what’s that? We’ve just gone live with his new website and brand!
Designing and building websites is what we do – it’s become second nature to us, but inevitably, there are things that hold the process up – this has got to be a first – Tim loved the initial visual mockups and the explanation of the site architecture so much that he gave us the nod to start building pretty much immediately. So we’ve been hard at it for the past week, conscious of the fact that Tim has an upcoming European tour with Dwight Yoakam, Joey & Rory and Laura Bell Bundy, that we really wanted to push his presence out there sooner rather than later.
So here we are, just gone midnight, and we’ve dropped Tim a text announcing his site is live, to which we got an immediate reply, “Looks great man – I better get tweeting!”
We first heard Tim when we were photographing the International Festival of Country Music @ Wembley in February and really took a liking to his unique voice. Tim digged the photos we presented him and we have kept in touch since. With his upcoming European gigs, a two week long festival in Seychelles and his impending visit to Nashville, we said, let’s get the ball rolling with a real slick site and brand… and the rest is history.
Tim’s album, “Chasing Dreams” is available from his site and also through Amazon with the ultra-melodic single “Goodbye Would Go” currently featured on the homepage.
We’re really happy with the final result, as is Tim and we hope you enjoy the experience. Check it out here.
Following on from the recent launch of the successful Elbow photography competition, we’ve rolled out two new competition sites using the Flickr API for the legendary Thin Lizzy and the late Ronnie James Dio. Using a combination of song titles and the famous Devil’s Horns, the two sites engage users to submit their own photos to Flickr which are pulled into a gallery feed into a central hub for the world of heavy metal fans to relish in.
The success of the ongoing Elbow Instagr.am competition has prompted our friends down at Universal to roll out several additional competitions for some of their other artists who have pending deluxe and remastered releases on the way.
The Dio and Thin Lizzy sites have taken on a broader role, not limiting themselves to Instagr.am, which is currently only available for iPhone users, but moving over to the wider realm using the Flickr API, which allows users with any device to participate – be that directly through Flickr (desktop or mobile) or via third party applications such as Twitter.
Fans will love these competitions as it gives them a chance to be creative with their photography – the Dio competition asks users to take snaps of themselves pulling the “Devil’s Horns” – made famous by the late Ronnie James Dio himself, and we’re already seeing a great mix of photos feeding through.
The beauty of visual sites such as Instagr.am, Flickr, Picasa are that they have spent a lot of time putting together sophisticated APIs which means from our perspective, integration into stand-alone websites is as straighforward as pulling the devil’s horns.
Universal are chuffed with the results, as we are and as we hope you will be too. You can view the two different sites using the links below:
We are very pleased to announce the launch of composer and orchestrator Jim Barne’s website and new brand. This was a real treat of a project as we were able to create a visual which encompassed Jim’s passion for photography, and integrated that into a musically focussed site.
Jim was recommended to us by another client of ours and we had a chat with him to go over what messages he wanted his identity to convey to his audiences. When we saw Jim’s photography, we felt it just had to be incorporated into the visuals as it is second to none. The storytelling behind it and the analog mood was a great starting point to put together visuals for the site and the brand, which we decided straight away, it would all need complementing somehow.
The brand is contemporary, the site is a blend of modern contemporary and vintage / retro – all encompassed in a fully responsive site build. The minimalism of the brand and site navigation is complemented with the bold storytelling behind the full screen slideshow and when one launches themselves into the site, there is still a nice clean feel and no content clutter. The responsive nature of the site build lends itself perfectly to mobile and tablet devices.
Sitting on a content management system, Jim will be able to update all aspects of his site, including audio tracks, blog articles and generic content, and the integration with social networks means his job is minimised with it doing the work for him on this front.
We’re really happy with the final product, as is Jim, and we hope you enjoy the experience. Check it out here: www.jimbarne.com.
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