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.
Royal Albert Hall Kiosk App
The joint efforts of The Royal Albert hall & 3B Digital to make the public spaces at the venue more interactive, informative and dynamic continue unabated with the design & implementation of a wonderful new Kiosk Interface of the live “What’s On” data.
The joint efforts of The Royal Albert hall & 3B Digital to make the public spaces at the venue more interactive, informative and dynamic continue unabated with the design & implementation of a wonderful new Kiosk Interface of the live “What’s On” data.
The challenge was to take feeds from the existing website’s data, filter and style to present on a “rolling” vertical screen within the Box Office area at the Hall.
The pages are shown on a simple Chromebit plugged into the big screen showing the webpage built with AngularJS, a JSON feed from their website and the excellent Kiosk Chrome App.
We know the result has been well received because while Jack was on-site supervising the installation he was surrounded by fascinated by Hall visitors eager to see what’s coming up!
Royal Albert Hall’s “Peter Blake app”
Back in May we were really delighted to be approached by the Royal Albert Hall (RAH) in relation to a wall mural they’d commissioned from Peter Blake. The mural featured over 400 of the most famous artists to have appeared at the historic venue over the years.
Back in May 2014 we were really delighted to be approached by the Royal Albert Hall in relation to a wall mural they’d commissioned from Peter Blake. The mural featured over 400 of the most famous artists to have appeared at the historic venue over the years.
The Hall provided a perfectly open brief that allowed us to bring both creative and practical disciplines suitably early in the project lifecycle. It’s exactly this level of involvement with clients that allows 3B to shine; we really appreciate it when clients trust us to help them take a “whacky” half-formed idea and mould it, with them, into a solid, deliverable tool that often serves a purpose greater than its original brief.
Essentially, our brief was to deliver an online interface that would work on mobile, kiosk and desktop. The site would be fully responsive and manageable by Hall staff constantly updating and amending the content held on each artist who is featured in the mural.
We had quite a challenging timeline on this project and we really threw ourselves at it, design through to launch, and it’s now delivered through two static kiosks in the Café Bar at the Door 12 entrance of the Royal Albert Hall as well as on mobile devices and computers via http://appearing.royalalberthall.com/.
We’re really delighted with this project; working closely with a terrific client that had realistic expectations and a truly creative flair we were able to produce an essentially simple and elegant interactive interface that will serve as a platform for “gamification" and enhancements going forward.
