The music video for ‘Bada Bing’ launched as a ‘like to view’ tab on Benny Banks’ Facebook page.

Building on the design by Kate Brighouse I used the same set-up as the holding page to insert a jQuery countdown timer styled with @font-face.

A few minutes before the launch time I set an unlisted YouTube video to be embedded and played as soon as the countdown hit 0.

The tab also included sharing functionality to promote the video across social networks.

To hype up the anticipation for the release of the ‘Bada Bing’ video I built a holding page counting down to the second the video would go live.

I used Keith Wood’s jQuery Countdown plugin to render a timer. The script was very easy to use and the additional settings made it easy to style and configure. The timezone setting allowed me to specify that the countdown should end at 11am UK time rather than the visitor’s timezone.

By using @font-face, I was able to render all links and even the numbers in the timer with the same fonts used on the single artwork.

The video premiered on a ‘like to view’ Facebook tab. So at 11am on Fri 13th Jan the countdown was switched with a message and link to watch the video on Benny Banks’ Facebook page. After the premier finished I embedded the video directly into the holding page.

Tawiah released a brilliant EP as a free download over the 2011 festive season. The ‘holiday gift’ features her new song ‘Run’, along with a remix, acapella version, a song called ‘Don’t Know You Yet’ and a powerful version of ‘Little Drummer Boy’.

To give the EP widespread reach I made an email sign-up widget, optimised for sharing on social networks and easily embedable on blogs and websites.

Having built many free download widgets over the past year I’ve always wanted to streamline the process with a more templated system. I used the ‘Run EP’ widget to start working on a dynamic system that remains quite flexible.

All the free download details are stored in a MySQL Database where the widget is assigned an ID. All image assets, mailing list information, text and meta data for sharing is then loaded and displayed dynamically when the widget is viewed.

The widget is mobile-friendly, providing an iFrame embed code to easily add it to blogs and websites.

To enhance Facebook sharing I built a Flash version of the widget that accesses all the data from an xml feed. This means that users can sign-up for the free download and share it without leaving their Facebook news feed.

I have a fair bit of work to do on the CMS as well as adding more flexible options, but this widget has helped me lay a lot of the foundation for a really powerful and easy to use system. Stay tuned.

To help increase Facebook activity for Paper Crows we created a ‘Like to Download’ Facebook tab giving fans access to the B-Side ‘Gone’.

Kate Brighouse designed the tab using stills from the online video for ‘Cloudbusting’. I put the PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript together to create the ‘like to view’ functionality.

The tab includes a Like button on the page that is only displayed to non-fans. Once clicked the page refreshes to reveal the download link.

While Fenech-Soler were on tour with Example they handed out wristbands with a url printed on them. Visiting fenechsoler.co.uk/freedownload allows fans to get a free download of ‘Golden Sun’. There were a few aspects to cover considering that a lot of people would access the url from their mobile phones.

The band’s management wanted to drive more Facebook activity without limiting it to Facebook fans. I made the URL redirect to a Facebook tab, but only if Javascript is enabled. If Javascript isn’t enabled the visitor is presented with a sign-up form where they can join the mailing list and have the mp3 emailed to them. If it is enabled they are redirected to a Facebook tab.

The Facebook tab is fairly basic ‘like to download’ functionality, with an inline like button that refreshes the page to reveal the link once clicked. The tab includes a jQuery drop-down that displays a sign-up form for fans that don’t want to use their Facebook account. They can join the mailing list and have ‘Golden Sun’ emailed to them instead.

At the end of November 2011 Warner Bros released a special edition version of Hugh Laurie’s debut album, ‘Let them Talk’. In addition to the three new studio recordings, we wanted to deliver a special deluxe digital product. With this in mind we created a bespoke iTunes LP, loaded with additional content.

I sourced plenty of content including new photographs, unreleased video and additional writing by both Hugh Laurie and his acclaimed producer Joe Henry.

The iTunes LP reads like a book, with Hugh’s notes on certain songs, thoughts on recording the album and his recollection of working with legends like Dr. John, Sir Tom Jones and Irma Thomas. Joe Henry also contributed a detailed introduction to all the talented musicians that performed on the album.

The LP is packed with great video content too. The ‘Live in New Orleans’ DVD contributed two live videos featuring Sir Tom Jones and Irma Thomas. I also included a six part documentary that covers Hugh’s journey to New Orleans and his time in Ocean Way Studio.

Once the iTunes LP was ready for release I briefed the team at Electric Lighting Station to create a trailer for the product. Oggy Hawkins did a superb job and created the video YouTube video embedded on the left.

The ‘Let Them Talk’ iTunes LP went on sale worldwide in December and was incredibly well received. It is great to know that something I created has reached such a wide international audience. Especially with Kate Brighouse and my names in the credits.

One of the latest signings to Warner Bros. UK is the acoustic duo Lilygreen & Maguire.

Kate Brighouse designed a simple holding page using a photograph by taken by Sam Stubbings. I then built and set the holding page up on lilygreenandmaguire.com.

The sign-up form uses Javascript to validate and submit email subscriptions, with a standard html form as the fallback option.

Our team recently started helping out with the occasional Rhino UK project. One of the first jobs we had to work on was a free download page for the new Alvin & The Chipmunks soundtrack.

Kate Brighouse designed the page, which I sliced up and converted into a php microsite.

The sign-up form is validated and submitted via jQuery to keep the process as smooth as possible.

The free download is only available for UK visitors so I had to build in geo-targeting capabilities to ensure that the sign-up form is only displayed to visitors from the UK. I used the MaxMind database to run IP detection and determine the page contents based on the visitor’s location.

Marlon Roudette (the former Mattafix frontman) has an irregular record deal. He was recently signed to Warner Bros for the UK release and promotion of his album ‘Matter Fixed’. While we look after him in the UK, he is also signed to Universal Music Germany (and Universal for additional territories).

This proves to be a challenge for online promotion where the internet is global. Universal’s German team have been incredibly helpful in allowing us access to Marlon’s online estate. While they’re much further into the campaign than we are, it was decided that a simple splash page would be the best point of contact for UK fans.

I wrote a simple geo-location script that checks the MaxMind database of IP addresses and redirects any UK visitors to marlonroudette.co.uk. The script also drops a cookie to prevent the need to check the database every time a returning visitor loads the site.

The splash page was designed by Kate Brighouse and features a YouTube embed, link to buy the Riding Home EP, a sign-up module that validates and submits via jQuery and a tour dates listing powered by the bandsintown facebook app.

By hosting the splash page on marlonroudette.co.uk we are able to keep the site updated without needing to involve the German team. The geo targeting script works very well to ensure that visitors always land on the site most relevant to the territory they’re in.

Pete Tong signed Paper Crows to his FFRR label and I’ve been helping out with the band’s online estate.

As the band are starting out, they wanted a fairly simple website so we decided to build the site on a Tumblr blog.

I set about building a custom tumblr theme to make the site more than a basic blog feed. The navigation works in conjunction with Tumblr’s static pages feature. I added static pages for music, videos, contact details and the mailing list. The music page is a collection of Soundcloud players while the Videos page is a bunch of embedded YouTube videos.

I configured the sidebar to contain a mailinglist sign-up module. The form uses jquery and ajax to validate and submit the users details seamlessly.

The sidebar also includes a Facebook like box, with customised css to improve the styling and integration with the site.

Paper Crows use the BandsInTown app to power their tour dates on Facebook and Myspace. I included the Javascript widget to include a tour dates page and sidebar widget.

Cufon made it easier to style the headings and navigation, adding a bit more style to the page’s design.

All posts include AddThis sharing with custom buttons. I also included Omniture tagging to track website traffic.

Finally I switched the A record for papercrows.com to make the tumblr blog the band’s official website at papercrows.com.

The Platinum Edition of the Overtones’ debut album went on sale with an even more deluxe version in iTunes.

The iTunes LP presents the album along with additional content within a very slick design by Kate Brighouse.

The iTunes LP includes the entire album as well as additional bonus tracks. The videos section covers all the group’s music videos, a number of behind the scenes clips, live footage and clips of the band interviewing each other. There are also two photo galleries with various press shots and behind the scenes photos.

To promote this version of the album and make sure fans understood the additional content I had Oggy Hawkins create a preview video. He did an incredible job and the video did a great job driving sales of the premium digital product.

To help drive Facebook likes on Clement Marfo & The Frontline’s Facebook page Alex Burford came up with a plan to reward Facebook fans with exclusive content.

Alex designed a tab to display behind the scenes photographs from the Overtime video shoot and I got to work building it.

The page used php to dynamically load thumbnails from a folder. I configured fancybox to open the full size images in a slick lightbox.

If a visitor isn’t a fan on the Facebook page they will see the thumbnails but they’re faded out and the link to the full sized image will be disabled. I floated a like button over the inactive gallery which reloads the page and disappears after a user clicks on it.

A few weeks later we were given the Cruelty Remix of Overtime to give away, so the exclusive content changed to a download link for Facebook fans.

I reconfigured the page to display a download link for existing fans and a like button for non-fans. The meta data on the page also needed to be edited so that the sharing functionality would post an updated message about the exclusive content on offer.

Just before the release of Jason Derulo’s sophomore album we launched a competition for fans to show of their dance moves.

Jason’s UK marketing manager, Katherine Parrott, wanted to run a competition where fans learn the dance routine for ‘Don’t Wanna Go Home’. She arranged for Jason and his choreographer to create an instructional video.

I was tasked with creating a microsite to house the competition alongside a stream of the new album. Kate Brighouse designed a page and I got to work on the code behind it. The competition element is really simple and just includes a YouTube embed of the instructional video and a link to enter the competition with a video response. I also configured the meta data so that sharing the page on Facebook or liking it would embed the YouTube video in the post.

The challenging part of the brief was including the stream of the new album. I used Soundcloud’s html5 player to build a playlist and then got to work on heavily modifying it to suit our needs. I encased the Soundcloud players in a content slider so that only one player is displayed at a time. Hitting the navigation buttons will slide the next or previous song into place. I took it a step further and modified Soundcloud’s JavaScript to trigger the slider whenever a song ends and a new one starts playing. This means that you can hit play on track one and the slider will keep up with the playlist as you listen to the entire album.

I’ve embeddded the actual microsite on the left to demonstrate how the player functions.

StooShe had a massive launch for their ‘Betty Woz Gone’ lyric video. Our aim was to drive views on YouTube and push people to Facebook.

We decided to build a Facebook tab with three elements: an embed of the YouTube video, a ‘like to access’ free download of the StooshTape and a ‘share to access’ free download of the track HotSteppa.

The result was that people would need to like StooShe on Facebook to get the StooshTape and they’d have to share the ‘Betty Woz Gone’ lyric video on Facebook to access the HotSteppa download.

Kate Brighouse designed the tab and I put all the necessary code together to embed the video and control the liking and sharing functionality.

The Facebook tab worked alongside loads of tweets & blog endorsements to help the amazing lyric video that Jess Gorick created storm up the YouTube charts establishing StooShe as a force to be reckoned with.

Along with the launch of Lianne La Havas’ EP and a redesigned website, we had an amazing set of live songs to give away as a sign-up incentive. ‘Live in LA’ is a four track recording of a gig that Lianne La Havas recently put on in the states. The songs sound incredible and make a brilliant sign-up incentive.

Kate Brighouse designed the widget and I assembled the swf to embed on the website and spread around blogs and social networks. I created an html fallback option for mobile phones and devices that can’t use flash. This time I extended the functionality to include jQuery form validation and submission running in the background so that the user never leaves the page.

As usual the widget is configured for enhanced sharing on social networks. Sharing the widget on Facebook will embed it into the news feed, allowing people to sign-up without leaving their Facebook home page. It is also set-up for easy sharing on Twitter and the embed code is easily obtained for bloggers to embed it on their own sites.

To give the free download maximum exposure on her networks I also created a Facebook application to include the widget on a tab.

To deliver the free download we needed a new html email template, so Kate Brighouse designed a new template to match the widget. Alex Burfurd then set it up to deliver the free download once you sign up. The widget proved to be hugely popular, instantly lifting Lianne’s fanbase and quickly spreading across all the blogs that are in the know.

The very talented Lianne La Havas needed a fairly simple but classy web presence at this early stage in her career.

We decided to build a clean holding page for her site and use the very popular Tumblr platform to power her blog. Kate Brighouse designed the two holding page and blog which I converted into a custom Tumblr theme.

The holding page is a static html page with three embedded videos, a free download widget, a sign-up form and tour dates. The sign-up form uses jQuery to validate the email field and submit the form without leaving the page while the tour dates are pulled in from the BandsInTown Facebook app and then formatted with the custom CSS styles I set up for the page.

To get started with the Tumblr theme, I used Minimalist as a template and adjusted it. Kate’s design was wider than the Tumblr default so I had to make a number of adjustment to account for that.

To ensure that videos are displayed at full width (rather than the default 500px) I used two Javascript functions. Matthew Buchanan’s script handles YouTube while some Javascript from Alex Hallajian resizes videos embedded from Vimeo.

I configured AddThis to place customized sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr on every post.

The design also required a specific font for the post titles so I configured Cufon to make sure that the headings and menu items always looks great, whilst also degrading gracefully for browsers that don’t support Javascript.

The Lianne La Havas website and blog look very basic, but have a fair bit going on to ensure that the stylish design is always maintained.

Following a hugely successful run on the summer festival circuit Fenech-Soler embarked on their headline tour of the UK. To maximise engagement around shows Alex Burford came up with the idea of adding content from every show to a map of the country on a Facebook Tab.

While the concept and user experience seems very simple and clean, quite a bit went into the back-end development of the Facebook tab.

Kate Brighouse provided a map of the UK as a very clean black outline on a white background.

I created a MySQL database to hold all the info for each event as it gets added. The database let’s the map know whether there is any content available for a show. I used vtip to create pop-up boxes for each event. Hovering over the event marker displays the details for a gig. If the show hasn’t happened or if content hasn’t been added then the marker stays faded out and links to a ticket purchase link. If the show is sold out then the link is removed and SOLD OUT is displayed in the info box.

The map detects if a video, blog or any photos have been added to the database and opens a fancybox pop-up to display the content.

The map would need to be updated as rapidly as possible so I wanted to give the band the tools to do it themselves. I built a mini CMS to manage the content.

While on the road Fenech-Soler could log in and edit each date by writing a blog, embedding a YouTube video and uploading photos.

They could also easily update the details of forthcoming dates by changing the ticket purchase link or marking the show as sold out.

Creating an upload feature for the photos was the most complex part of the CMS. The content lightbox displays square thumbnails which would need to be resized, cropped and filed during the upload process. I looked at various scripts and eventually found a great chunk of php to do the job. The band could easily upload photos for each show.

I wrote a custom php script to generate the gallery. The script searches the directories for photos and lists all the thumbnails with links to the main images to open in a lightbox.

To make sure the tab could be shared properly I created a static html page with all the relevant meta data for social sharing. This page has a meta refresh tag that redirects visitors to the tab on Facebook. I then configured sharing buttons on the map to ensure that it always uses the correct information when posted across Facebook and Twitter.

The map looks great and is serving as a really engaging tour diary for Fenech-Soler.

As part of a rebranding strategy, the decision was made to simplify Fenech-Soler’s website and only maintain a basic holding page.

The new brand features a triangle made up of the band’s début album cover sliced into smaller triangles.

I sliced the image into numerous pieces and then re-assembled the image in Dreamweaver.

Some of the smaller triangles act as hot spots linking to the band’s online estate.

I used JQuery to animate the triangles when the user hovers over the them. Rolling your mouse over the hot spots will make the triangle fade out to reveal the link.

To keep the site more integrated I used the Fancybox library to open all the links in a lightbox iframe. Facebook and Twitter don’t allow iFraming so I built mini versions of the band’s profiles to display in the lightbox.

I used Remy Sharp’s JQuery Twitter feed to display the band’s latest tweets and also added a Twitter Follow button so that fans can easily follow the band from within the lightbox.

To integrate Facebook I included a Like Box with a feed taken from the band’s Facebook page. Fans can easily like Fenech-Soler’s page, view the band’s latest posts and see which of their friends are already fans of the band.

The Tour Dates pop-up is powered by BandsInTown, using Javascript to sync with the dates listed on Facebook and Myspace.

While Fenech-Soler are on the road doing an extensive festival touring circuit, they’ve had a film maker following them and documenting the shows. These videos are all hosted on YouTube but I added them to the website in a slick lightbox.

The page also links to the White Versions EP Widget I built some time ago. I made the widget pop-up in a lightbox and added a fallback version for browsers without flash support.

One major issue with a roll-over based page, is that mobile users don’t have a mouse to activate the rollover. I set the page to detect iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Android users and apply different settings to the page. All the hot spots are partially faded to start with, so that all the links are visible. Mobile users are greeted by the White Versions widget opened in a lightbox.

At the end of 2009 Brandon Prevost offered me a big freelance job; building a new website and online estate for Plush. I have been a fan and friend of the band since the early days of Native Noise on UCT Radio in 2003.

When we first started discussions around the new website I still worked at Communion / Beatroute. It was actually thanks to Brandon that I found out about my current position at Warner Bros.

Plush.us is built on the WordPress platform along with all the latest tools to enhance usability and engagement. It has been a while since I’ve created a custom Worpdress theme from scratch and the platform has introduced a number of useful enhancements. I started with twenty ten as a base and dug deep into the code to make it produce the high-end website I had in mind.

My design for the site is very clean and simple, based on the album artwork by Pierre Coetzee. I used the colourful background image as a fixed full-screen background and styled all the content boxes to have the same black background and border as the logo on the album cover. The header includes the new logo and a photograph by Deborah Rossouw.

It took a lot of code to customise the twenty ten theme. I added an extra dynamic sidebar for widgets and resized the content area for two different page templates (one wide and one narrow). I added a new widget area to the home page that allows the band to upload a large banner. The banner zone is only visible on the home page and can easily be removed by removing any widgets from the zone.

All updates can be assigned to three categories which will determine where they appear on the site.

The home page displays a combination of official news updates and more personal blog posts written by the band, visitors can then click on a tab to isolate the content and only display one of the categories. The third category is for exclusive content in the members’ area. Any members-only posts are only visible to fans that join the US Lounge Members’ Area. The band will be able to use this area to reward their most dedicated fans with exclusive content.

I made quite a few modifications to make the US Lounge Members’ Area an easy user experience. I used a Facebook Connect plugin that allows fans to create an account with two clicks. I made extensive modifications to the plugin to ensure that any new members’ would also be added to the phplist powered mailing list. Using phpCurl and inspired by Jesse Heap‘s work on the dual registration plugin I was able to seamlessly pass the users’ details to phplist.

After ages wrestling with Facebook Connect and the Graph API it became clear that Facebook doesn’t share any useful information about the user’s country. As Plush have fans around the world it is important to determine where their members are based. The data made available from Facebook is very unpredictable. The current destination field could be “Cape Town, South Africa”, “Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa” or “Cape Town, Western Cape”. This format makes it a huge challenge to determine the user’s country. The solution I came up with was quite a task to implement. I created a new database table that lists every country in the world. If the last part of the user’s location matches one of these countries then that value is passed through. I then expanded the table to include states and provinces for a lot of countries. So if a user’s location is “Los Angeles, California”, the database will determine that they are based in the USA.

Aware that not everyone is comfortable with Facebook Connect’s one click login process, I added a manual sign-up option to the registration page. I used the phplist dual registration plugin to add phplist functionality to the default wordpress registration page. I also styled the page slightly to make it clear that the user was still on Plush’s website.

A collection of useful wordpress plugins help to make content really easy to manage.

TubePress syncs with Plush’s YouTube account and automatically imports any new YouTube videos to the videos page and the latest videos sidebar widget.

Bandsintown is a Facebook application that creates a tour dates tab on an artist’s fan page. The app also includes a wordpress plugin to list those dates on your website. With some additional styling I was able to integrate the band’s tour schedule into the shows page as well as a sidebar widget. Bandsintown also includes a myspace widget so Plush only have to update their facebook page to publish tour dates on their website and myspace profile simultaneously.

Twitter Widget Pro is a very simple WordPress plugin with enough classes to make styling a breeze. It was easy to add a list of Plush’s latest tweets to the sidebar.

FAlbum
The Plush photo gallery is powered by a the FAlbum plugin which allows WordPress sites to sync with a Flickr account to dynamically create galleries in the website. I created my own template to make the site fit into the website’s style. The band only needs to update their Flickr account to keep the website current.

Custom FAlbum widget.
I wanted to display the latest photographs in a sidebar widget. I wrote my own custom plugin to work alongside FAlbum to display the latest thumbnails. The plugin is very basic but allows the user to set the number of photographs to display and includes a few classes to make styling easier.

Google Analytics for WordPress makes it really simple to add Google Analytics to a wordpress site. Having created an analytics account for Plush, I only had to add the site ID to the plugin to start recording the site’s traffic.

Admin Bar Disabler proved to be a simple but useful plugin. As the site encourages user registration, a lot of visitors would see the WordPress admin bar at the top of the page. The options for subscribers are fairly limited and I didn’t want users to find the admin bar confusing. I used the plugin to disable the admin bar for all users unless they have admin rights.

I used the standard WordPress text widget to add some html for more sidebar modules, including a Facebook like box and a store widget linking to merch and music.

The cms features built into the twenty ten theme make this project far more valuable for the band. They are able to easily customise the menu, changing the order, adding or removing page links (including external sites). The header photo and background image can also be replaced within the site’s cms, it’s really easy for an admin to upload new images for these sections.

All in all, the new Plush.us is a very powerful artist website; maximising integration with the social web, simplifying updates and driving data acquisition through fan engagement. The project took a long time, but the challenge allowed me to expand my development skills and explore the latest technology. I’m very proud of the end result.

In the brief period before Clement Marfo’s new website launches, I created a fairly simple holding page.

The page was designed by Kate Brighouse and I got to work making it as dynamic as possible.

The page includes a mailing list sign-up form, a soundcloud player and a styled list of tour dates powered by the BandsInTown facebook app and a twitter feed. To ensure that the twitter feed doesn’t exceed the maximum number of calls to Twitter’s API I wrote a timed fall-back script to display a cached feed and ensure that tweets are always visible.

Linkin Park’s latest single, Iridescent, is the lead track on the new Transformers film: Dark of the Moon.

Shazam came on board to help us promote the single and an awesome competition we were running around it.

If fans Shazam Linkin Park’s Iridescent they will be directed to a microsite that allows them to enter the competition. The prize is a trip to Berlin for two people where the winners get to attend a special screening of Transformers 3 with the band.

I built the microsite with the sign-up form based on a design by Kate Brighouse. The page had to be optimised for mobile browsing so it automatically stretches to zoom in and fill the screen on mobile browsers. The competition rules appear in a slick JQuery overlay.

To promote The Wombats deluxe boxset for ‘This Modern Glitch’, I developed a simple Facebook tab using the designs from Rhiannon Jones in our D2C department.

It’s a fairly simple iframed facebook tab with some additional javascript on it. I added some basic functionality to display a larger product image when the user moves their mouse over the thumbnails.

While I’m building the new official Plush website the band wanted an updated holding page to promote the new single ‘Dancing in a Storm’.

I assembled a fairly basic page to include the new logo (designed by Pierre Coetzee) and a photograph by Deborah Rossouw.

The page includes a sign-up form linked to phplist as well as social network links and a Facebook like button. I embedded the new single ‘Dancing in a Storm’ using a soundcloud player and customised the meta data to optimize Facebook sharing. Pressing the like button will share the page on your wall along with the embedded soundcloud player, so the song will reach the maximum number of people possible.

I was also asked to include the upcoming tour dates, but I didn’t want to be stuck with the job of constantly updating a static list of dates. I added the bands in town Facebook application and used their simple javascript package to make sure the latest tour dates stay synced between the holding page, Facebook and Myspace pages.

The holding page effectively showcases the new Plush single and tour dates, while encouraging sign-ups and social sharing.

I was asked to create a holding page that would introduce All The Young and showcase their new music video.

Kate Brighouse designed a header banner to float above a full screen flash player. I used jquery to make the 3 boxes slide out when the user’s mouse hovers over that section of the header. The sign-up form uses some ajax to validate and submit the form.

I stretched a Brightcove player to automatically play the video as a full screen background. The player includes some subtle controls that fade out when the mouse isn’t moving over the video.

It’s a very stylish and simple holding page that effectively showcases the band’s first single.

The iTunes LP includes the 15 track ‘Immersion’ album, 12 remixes, 3 music videos, 3 behind the scenes videos about making the album, a feature from Pendulum’s live show at Wembley Arena, footage of the tour visuals used in live shows and a collection of photographs.

I designed the photo gallery using one of Valp’s website backgrounds and included the full-screen zoom functionality I used on the Foals iTunes LP.

The remixes section we envisioned required a bit of new code to achieve. I wrote a custom Javascript function that changes the page background and playlist buttons according to which remix is selected.

Once again I briefed WME to put together a top class video trailer showcasing the LP. This had a great reaction from Pendulum fans on YouTube.

The Pendulum ‘Immersion’ iTunes LP is available to download now.

The ‘Total Life Forever’ LP is very rich in content beyond the 12 tracks on the album. It includes a stack of additional audio such as 15 atmospheric loops and demos, 11 remixes, 2 b-sides and 5 live tracks.
The band’s 4 videos from Total Life Forever are included along with a 20 minute film documenting the recording process. Photographs from the recording sessions in Sweden are also included.

Following the great reception of the Biffy Clyro iTunes LP, I wanted to learn a few new techniques and add some nice new touches to this project.
The photo gallery is far more advanced and includes a full-screen option that is quite smooth and stylish.

This LP also includes my first visualizer. It’s a simple slideshow that flickers through a series of abstract photos. The sequence was an expansion of a technique used on the Foals website and a DVD in the deluxe boxset version of the album. Our digital intern Andy Knox helped put the slideshow together.

The artwork/lyrics pages came together really well, allowing users to view the booklet and play tracks as they explore the album.

After completing the album we commissioned the Warner video team to create a trailer video to showcase the LP’s content. Oggy Hawkins made a brilliant video to highlight all the content in the digital package. I also created a screensaver emulating the slideshow in the visualizer.

The Foals ‘Total Life Forever’ iTunes LP is available from iTunes now.

Download the Screensaver.
Windows Version
Mac Version

The new dance label in Warner’s catalogue, OMT Records, needed an online presence to be built from scratch. I set about building a microsite for the label’s official domain based on a very slick design by Kate Brighouse.

The site uses a simple JQuery slider to display photographs in a slideshow. The slideshow is currently promoting the release of the ‘Superclub’ compilation.

The page includes a basic flash player looping a track as well as all the standard social network links, a facebook like button and a signup form for the mailing list.

Fenech-Soler are one of the most exciting new acts to join the Warner stable. They’re signed to B-Unique Records but licensed to Warner Bros.

While the new website is in development we need a decent holding page to collect data, list tour dates, display the latest video and share basic information through a twitter feed.

The band has incredible style and imagery so Kate Brighouse did an amazing job designing the page. I then wrote the html, css and php needed to bring it all to life.

Towards the end of June I was given a very challenging and exciting project.

My first attempt to build an iTunes LP would be for the incredible Biffy Clyro. iTunes LPs are interactive rich media digital albums. Essentially it’s the digital version of special edition packaging with extra content. LPs can include a range of content including lyrics, photos, videos and bonus features.

We initially had a 4 week deadline to deliver the project, but due to Apple’s lengthily approval process, this was reduced to only 4 days for the entire project. After much frustration with Apple’s bizarre code structure and many late nights at the office we managed to pull it off.

Warner’s in-house designer Kate Brighouse did another brilliant job on the design elements. I had to piece all the javascript and css together to make everything run smoothly. Alex Marshall at Warner International was a brilliant resource who helped me make sense of the code with numerous examples of LPs he’s worked on in the past.

As a Biffy Clyro fan, I’m really proud of the Only Revolutions iTunes LP. It is a quality package including lyrics and commentary for all the songs, 6 music videos, 3 behind the scenes videos, a video of the band discussing the album in detail, a 45 min film made during the recording of the album, 31 photographs and the band’s detailed biography.

Because awareness of the iTunes LP format is fairly low, I proposed that we should create a YouTube video highlighting the contents of the package. Dan Massie and the team at Warner Music Entertainment did an excellent job making a trailer to promote the release. You can watch the embedded video on the left.

Despite the stress around the incredibly tight deadline, this project was hugely rewarding. It’s amazing to think that so many people will buy something I created for a band I’m a massive fan of, what an honour!

The Only Revolutions iTunes LP is out now – only available from iTunes.

UPDATE:
The album went to No.2 on the iTunes chart and No.3 on the Official UK charts. This was an amazing result for an album that was released a year before.

http://www.breakfromtheasylum.com

Disturbed’s UK Marketing Manager, Katherine Parrott, chose to do something more interesting than regular print ads to promote the band’s new album.

Through a partnership with Metal Hammer, she ran a highly engaging competition/puzzle throughout the pages of the magazine. The puzzles pointed readers to breakfromtheasylum.com where they would need to enter the answers to access a free download.

As an in-house project, Kate Brighouse designed the holding page and I built the microsite. The site’s functionality is fairly simple so I used Javascript for validation along with the jquery framework for some basic animation.