Benjamin Britten was one of the 20th-century’s great composers. He is particularly known for his operas, but also for choral works and many song cycles. See how we designed multiple digital platforms for this iconic artist.
Working in collaboration with technical partner System Simulation we led the user experience design for the project that included defining a site map, user profiles, user journeys and wireframes. The creative user interface design involved the identification of 20 templates that would be optimised for desktop, tablet and mobile. Finally the creation of three HTML5 interactives brought the site to life with an interactive timeline of Britten’s life, a music sampler and an interactive map of Britten’s Red House.
The home page was designed in flexible modules to enable fresh content updates. With careful attention paid to information hierarchy, the audience is guided through the website experience using clearly defined signposts.
The mega menu allows users of the website to see at a glance the main pages within each top level section. By using a simple rollover they could see visual images and descriptions about each page without having to click into it to read the content. This has resulted in an improved user experience.
The creation of a bold grid of news allowed the audience eye to scan visually across the updates of Britten’s legacy from around the world.
This HTML5 interactive timeline documented the birth of Benjamin Britten all the way to his death in 1976.
The timeline operated on a horizontal scroll that could be browsed in decades. Every key event was represented by a title and thumbnail that could be expanded upon with a simple click or press on touch-sensitive devices.
This interactive music sampler was created to help an uneducated audience to experience the best of Benjamin Britten’s music using a playful variety of different filters for the music. The audience could filter on: top 10, mood, genre, instrument, writers, speed, date and text search. The visual pictured above is the “speed” filter where the audience could drag the slider on the metronome to browse the different Britten tracks that matched the specified speed.
The HTML5 interactive map explored Britten’s Aldeburgh as well as a 360-degree tour of the rooms inside The Red House. The design involved the creation of original watercolour artwork for the bird’s eye view of Aldeburgh in Suffolk.
Microsite containing a database of all of Britten’s songs, searchable by date, duration, accompaniment or voice type.
An interactive timeline where related videos appear during the performance. The main performance continues to play unless you choose to launch the related video. The microsite also included panoramic 360 tours of Britten’s studio space.
