Memories of The Royal Albert Hall to celebrate 150 years!
We decided to build the Royal Albert Memories site to allow people to share those stories, bringing them all together in one place rather than just siloed on the various social media platforms.
The Royal Albert Hall and we have worked on a number of projects over the years, and in 2017 we started brainstorming ideas for their 150th year in 2021. Peter Blake’s mural already celebrated the diversity of artists who have graced their stage, and we all agreed that showcasing the audiences would be the next step in celebrating the legacy of the Hall. Anyone who has been to an event at this iconic venue will have a story to tell, often accompanied by a photograph, some video or a ticket stub. We decided to build the Royal Albert Memories site to allow people to share those stories, bringing them all together in one place rather than just siloed on the various social media platforms.
Originally the plan was to simply present a body of “memories” of the hall as submitted by visitors online. The means of submission, and the manner of on-site presentation was very much open to discussion and it wasn’t long before 3B came up with some fun ideas.
We knew we wanted an easy way for the public to add content to the site, and for it to integrate social media as well as uploaded content easily. We needed to allow text and photos via upload, and anything else by pasting a link to a social object such as a Tweet or Instagram post for automatic embedding. We integrated embed.ly which offers over 700 social networks and external sites for hosting such assets.
We have huge experience in managing and presenting information from large and often ancient and unwieldy databases - a challenge we never shy from and this was no exception; a number of internal meetings led us to the conclusion that these memories needed to be aligned with a database of past events at the Hall.
Thankfully the Hall had just such a database - it already served the Hall’s archive pages on the site - but it was quite antiquated in its set up and needed a “deep clean” to render it usable for our purposes… but it was a great start!
Design was less of a challenge; the Hall has a well established and distinct set of brand guidelines that ensures the site we built sits comfortably within the family of satellite sites that orbit royalalberthall.com. Our main UX challenge was ensuring that site visitors could easily find where and how to browse memories and events and leave their own submissions, linked to the appropriate event.
The results are something we’re hugely proud of - and something that’s been ready for launch for some time, waiting until this year (2021) when the Hall can announce its plans to celebrate its 150th anniversary.
A new database resource site for "Whispering" Bob Harris!
Database sites are beasts. By definition they grow, and by design they are adaptable and endlessly re-interpretable. They require a depth of imagination and technical acumen to design properly, as well as no small amount of bravery (to take on) that only comes with experience.
Anyone who knows 3B also knows we are a group that really LOVES our music! Our development and marketing teams are almost entirely musicians of varying skill and aptitude and the hysterically tone-deaf Bremer brothers invariably donate most of their disposable income to live music events.
We’ve also, over the years, garnered considerable experience and expertise in delivering sites that leverage large and often unwieldy historical databases and dynamic content.
Put these 2 essential factors together and it seemed only natural and right that when we’d discovered that our great broadcasting “hero”, Robert Brinley Joseph “Whispering Bob” Harris, OBE, had unhappily retired his colossal database of past show playlists and running orders, we should step in!
Bob was delighted to hear from us, and we were equally delighted to have the opportunity to meet the great man himself. And he didn’t disappoint; I always say you should never meet your heroes (I also always say you shouldn’t call people heroes unless they’ve recently pulled a handful of kittens out of a burning building, but I do it anyway) but Bob is exactly what you’d hope he’d be - charming, chatty & very very happy to regale with his many stories… ideas for projects and schemes abound!
But first the database - a huge resource of songs, photos, artists and the like that needed seriously sorting and sifting. One of 3B’s founders, Adam Belson, was quick to volunteer his expertise in recommending that we build the database using React - an open source javascript library we’d not worked with before despite our many forays into Big Data. I was delighted that one of our developers, Stoyan, was excited and keen to use React and so he was assigned to this project.
Database sites are beasts. By definition they grow, and by design they are adaptable and endlessly re-interpretable. They require a depth of imagination and technical acumen to design properly, as well as no small amount of bravery (to take on) that only comes with experience. But what they need most is an obsessive eye for detail and accuracy. At 3B we often talk of taking on “hostile” databases; fields and fields of cells that are inconsistent, inaccurate or incomplete, and what always astonishes me is how Jack Bremer fizzes with excitement whenever he gets his teeth into this sort of data. His tricks and techniques for ferreting out date inaccuracies and the like leave me boggled every time, and this database was no exception.
Suffice to say that, nearly a year after this project was first discussed, we finally launched this new resource today (19th August 2020) - on the occasion of Bob’s 50th Anniversary in radio broadcasting. Like any great database this will grow, evolve and be subject to revision and, no doubt, corrections - and we are so excited to see the thing released into the wild!
“I am so happy to have partnered with 3B Digital and so excited to launch our new Bob Harris site on the 50th anniversary of my first ever radio programme.
Working with Alex, Jack and the 3B team is proving to be a joy and an education. I am in awe of their phenomenal work ethic and extremely proud of the resource we are creating and building. Navigating the site is simple and enjoyable and the depth of information 3B have compiled is absolutely awesome. Friends have been telling me that they have been happily searching the archive for hours on end.
It has taken more than a year of collaboration to reach this moment and we are all thrilled with the results. And this is just the beginning. Over the next few months the site will grow as we pour more and more information online for you to explore and enjoy.”
Bob Harris, OBE
Take a look at the work yourself; if you have even a casual interest in, or knowledge of, classic rock, pop and / or country music we hope you’ll find something here to enjoy.
Visit the new site at archive.bobharris.org/.
The Watercolour World - a truly immersive experience
A genuinely fascinating and engaging project, this; a presentation of a database of painted works so immersive and layered as to hold our professional and personal attention pretty much solidly for the last 7 months.
A genuinely fascinating and engaging project; a presentation of a database of painted works so immersive and layered as to hold our attention solidly for the last 6 months of 2018.
The Watercolour World is a UK Charity set up specifically to digitally document as many global pre-photography documentary watercolours as they can realistically lay their hands on - an ongoing (and hopefully never ending) project to preserve these academically invaluable assets for future generations.
Watercolour World were already one website into their lifecycle when they came to us; it had become apparent that theirs was a proposition with considerable “heft” - that delivery of their content, and the many and varied means by which that content should be navigated, required calling in the big boys (us) to deliver their rapidly expanding database of high-resolution artworks through an intuitive and engaging website.
This was a rapidly developing proposition in terms of scope and technology; the commissioned Minimum Viable Product very quickly became something quite polished and slick - not least because of the technology we chose to employ to deliver key assets and facilitate search.
By the time of launch The Watercolour World took delivery of a fully functioning online database of many tens of thousands of stunning paintings - all indexed and searchable by numerous means; tags, fields and of course the marvellous map.
