Bluish

My partner and I formed Bluish to allow us to work on a broader range of digital media and design together. We hit the ground running and found we were immediately busy with large digital projects for clients such as Nestlé, Eidos, Orange and others in a maturing digital space (well, not that mature — Macromedia Flash had just been launched…).

While working on the music soundtrack for a CD-ROM that had a contribution from Siouxsie and the Banshees guitarist Jon Klein, we got chatting, and this led to a meeting with Storm Thorgerson. Storm was part of the legendary design house Hipgnosis, designing most of Pink Floyd’s album covers among many others — and he wanted a website.

It was a baptism of fire, but we were able to deliver. Storm then insisted that we work on other projects with him, introducing us to EMI and Capitol Records in what was the start of many years of high-end music industry digital work, creating engaging, interactive projects that had to be served reliably to an audience of millions.

I was now fluent in PHP, Java, HTML, JavaScript, Flash (ahem) and the complete full-stack process. I regularly worked with high-end providers to ensure clean delivery of sometimes challenging server load and bandwidth issues. While Flash held up the development of the modern web, it enabled the creation of deeply engaging experiences in a rather clumsy browser ecosystem and soon became our bread and butter.

And then along came video. Web video in 2001 was not like it is today — it was small, grainy and had terrible audio. While working on a Pink Floyd project, we were given access to Nick Mason’s archive of videos and began working out how to deliver a better experience. Video codec technology was progressing fast, and I could provide a much higher quality experience using the latest codecs and tools. Partnering with EMI, Apple and Akamai, I delivered bespoke video players built in QuickTime and Flash to a global audience — so large that the whole internet could slow down on a new release.

After the success and popularity of those video players, I built and launched a web video service that allowed video production houses to distribute reels to their clients. YouTube was still some years away at this point.

Our work got us noticed, leading to press, awards and recognition, including a Webby, an Apple Design Award and a number of music and marketing awards — mostly for innovation.