The Crim Collective @ Pictoplasma Festival Berlin 2011

The Pictoplasma Festival in Berlin this year staged a one-week program of inspiring presentations, lectures, installations and workshops that included The Crim Collective and their exhibition “Mechanicalism”, and I helped get their website up and running in time to help broadcast their work ‘live’.

The site makes good use of large background imagery, which is pulled through from the collective’s Flickr account. The guys were taking pictures throughout the event and uploading them as the exhibition was unfolding so the site was constantly changing and reflecting the status of the event. It was also built to adapt to mobile devices for those checking the site from the exhibition itself.

Crim are a bunch of extremely talented guys, founded by a mate of mine. So do check out their Vimeo, and keep an eye out for future developments on the website!

Art in Yorkshire

It’s a big year for Art around my way. The Hepworth gallery has opened down the road in Wakefield, and this year also sees a year long series of exhibitions celebrating Yorkshire’s artistic heritage, aptly name ‘Art in Yorkshire’.

Art in Yorkshire – supported by Tate is a partnership between: Axis (commissioner and content developer), fuse8 (designer and developer) and York Museums Trust (lead museum for the Art in Yorkshire consortium). Leeds Met Gallery contributed to the initial concept through The Culture Company’s Artimelt Academy. The app is funded by Arts Council England and MLA Renaissance Yorkshire.

It’s been an exciting project to work on, and has led to the development of a fantastic framework that can be used for future projects. You can read more in my interview about the app on The Culture Vulture or by viewing the case study on the fuse8 website.

During, the development process we also took a few of the team down to Yorkshire Sculpture Park to take in the surroundings and to brainstorm ideas about how mobile can be used in such environments. It was a very valuable exercise, that led to some great all-round thinking for future projects. Check out a little video we put together:

BBC iPlayer iPad app review

I was asked recently by The Drum to write a review of the new iPlayer app for the iPad.

It’s fair to say it’s a great app, and a great way to catch up with some telly, but i was a little disappointed in the amount of advancements made from the existing web version. Fingers crossed the updated versions live up to its potential!

You can read my full review on the  Drum website.

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The Migraine Trust online diary and campaign

The brief was to redesign the website, but the question we asked ourselves was, how can we encourage more user interaction with the charity?

Small charities such as The Migraine Trust are facing extremely difficult times. Survival is all about gaining new supporters and creating engaging content that puts the charity, and it’s message, in front of people on a regular basis.

The Migraine Trust came to fuse8 with a set budget which they had raised through a medical grant. We also added to the budget in the form of a charitable donation, cos we’re nice like that. Still, the aim of the project was to redesign a flawed website.

Now, a website providing information about migraines is only going to be able to go so far in persuading visitors to return time and time again, I should know (I’ve been suffering with migraines for over 8 years), so we started to think of ways to increase engagement and spread the word.

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