Music Mark

Music Mark’s timeline for the project was a fairly ambitious 9 weeks and so this called for a more agile approach.

We began by establishing the branding fundamentals and the foundations of the new design style. The first three weeks were dedicated to thinking about this overall design language and establishing a central Style Guide that could serve as a reference throughout the project, helping to ensure consistency and speed up the creative work that would follow.

From here we then worked section by section through the site with a series of 1-week sprints. These tacked planning, content development and design together to build up a good picture of the shape of each section and create a corresponding set of wireframes, design prototypes and copy deck.

By allocating a specific amount of resource to each of these sprints and simply aiming to achieve the maximum fidelity possible within the time available we were able to make a predictable amount of progress each week and keep tight control over the budget.

Development kicked off as soon as the first design sprint had been completed. This helped bring the overall delivery forward and allowed us to move design thinking into the browser much earlier than would happen in a more traditional waterfall-style project.

The website features quite a range of functionality and content types, encompassing a members directory, news archive, resource library, events calendar and job listings. And that content runs deep, with more than 1,400 distinct pages. To add to the development challenge we would be moving platforms, from Drupal to WordPress, and that content migration needed to be achieved without access to the original database.

After a successful website launch we were thrilled to be asked to translate the new design style into print by producing Music Mark’s annual conference guide.

Event guides usually call for a different approach than then you might find on a traditional print marketing design job. Content tends to remain very fluid up to the print deadline and arrives in a variety of forms from many different sources, whether it is speaker bios, sponsor adverts or schedule details. Over the years we have developed a specific production workflow for this type of job which embraces this unpredictability.

Coming fresh off the re-brand, this work also presented a good opportunity to further test its practical application and fold any additions back into the main brand guidelines.