Mindstorm

The brief

Mindstorm are one of those dream clients for any web agency: highly technical guys and gals producing groundbreaking technology products. The core of their output is interactive touch surfaces and have shaped themselves up against the likes of Microsoft. Superb!

Naturally, we were thrilled when Mindstorm's head of marketing informed us we were on the shortlist of their desired agencies to produce a revamp of their online presence. We beat the competition (technically, a massacre) to the podium and became Mindstorm's website build agency - our harmony of design, technology and marketing proving once again to be the bee's knees that cut the mustard in order to get the cream to the cat.

The brief was a challenging one as external deadlines - the launch of their signature product on ITV's X-Factor - meant that Mindstorm (itself a 'challenge brand') had to simultaneously roll out a new brand and new digital assets along with the new website. Our collective experience in the front line of such briefs stood us in great stead as we designed and built a content-managed website and assets that allowed the neccessary flexibility demanded by a brand evolving alongside the project timeline.

Design

Boy, this was a toughie! We hit the ground running, first analysing the best way to create a transparent framework which would allow itself to be populated and flavoured by the eventual Mindstorm brand. The answer came to us in the question: transparency.

The basic structure of the site design took the form of a classic technology company (white, black and light grey gradients). We then utilised the power of Photoshop to create a series of digital assets (icons, buttons, hyperlinks, etc.) that were either transparent or used shape layers, which gave us the power to quickly change the colour of every aspect of the site to any desired colour palette in minutes. Genius!

The latter stages of the design phase were relatively pain-free as new iterations of the brand were quickly and seamlessly accommodated. In fact, this built-in flexibility allowed a feedback process to develop whereby the brand could be seen in context which gave Mindstorm the ability to further refine and shape the brand so that it became highly portable across multiple forms of media. We were only too happy to help in the refinement process, and all at no extra cost!

Technical

For once, the design proved more of a technical challenge than the development. The backend was a fairly straightforward PHP CMS build, but careful consideration had to be given to the CSS. Classes were written so that site-wide changes could be rolled out along with newly-implemented design amendments with an absolute minimum of fuss and a quick turnaround time.

The result

Our work ethic proved to be a solid anchor for Mindstorm throughout the shifting sands of the project. Normally costly and time-consuming design decisions were rolled out within the hour, and any down-time was spent assisting with other areas like video encoding and asset manipulation.

The tight 5-week build deadline was met on-budget with the help of plenty of coffee and hob-nobs. It was great to see the product in action on the X-Factor on the Saturday night after launch - Simon Cowell, Dannii Minogue, Cheryl Cole and Louis Walsh clearly enjoying their experiences using the Aurora interactive table.

A raft of new assets and updates are planned for the site in early 2010, so watch this space...