Bluish
Award winning digital boutique, specialising in the music industry
Working with my partner, we designed, developed and delivered 100s of projects using cutting edge tools across the web and CD-ROM.
Bluish's clients
We were trusted by some of the biggest brands on the planet.
Amaze (Liverpool)
Arni & Kinski
Bluepet
Capitol Records
Cartmell Holdings
Co3i
Codix
Eidos Interactive
EMI Records
Finlay Cowan
Future Publishing
NABS
Nestlé
Organics Direct
Peter Ashworth
Science Photo Gallery
Science Photo Library
Star Alliance
Stephen Jones Millinery
Storm Thorgerson
StormStudios Design
The Organic Delivery Company
Warner Bros. Music
Warner Bros. Pictures
Yeo Valley Organic
Agencies:
APL
EuroRSCG
James Walter Thompson (JWT)
Wunderman Cato Johnson
Notable Music Projects
We won our clients awards…
Pink Floyd
2002 BT Digital Music Award - Best Promotional Campaign
Robbie Williams
2003 BT Digital Music Award - Best Innovation*
2004 Apple Design Award - Best QuickTime: Promotion
2005 BT Digital Music Award - Best Promotional Campaign
The Flaming Lips
2003 Webby Award - Best Music Site (Judges panels)
2003 Webby Award - Best Music Site (People’s vote)
2003 Time Magazine - Top 50 Websites
Hell is for Heroes
2003 BT Digital Music Award - Best Innovation*
* Award given to both projects
Music
We worked directly with a lot of artists…
Aalacho
Beth Orton
Blonde Redhead
David Bowie
David Gilmour
Doves
Ed Harcourt
El Presidente
Fightstar
Hell is for Heroes
Iron Maiden
Jessica Lauren
John Cale
Josh Groban
Kate Bush
LCD Soundsystem
Sigur Rós
Starsailor
The Beastie Boys
The Blockheads
The Concretes
The Magic Numbers
The Vines
Movies
The Matrix was particularly interesting as it involved creating a bespoke cryptographic system to protect hidden media in the site from being discovered by hackers; life imitating art.
Dreamcatcher
The Animatrix
The Last Samurai
The Matrix
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
From the archives…
2000 Pink Floyd: Wish You Were Here
Created for shockwave.com, Macromedia’s showcase site, it was both an homage to Syd Barrett and a showcase for Flash 2.0, which had yet to gain video playback features.
Back in 2000, broadband was rare, everyone was still on dial up and computers maybe had 256 megabytes of RAM. Video on the internet was still some way off and everything took an age to download.
Nevertheless, Storm Thorgerson had assumed he was making a short film and had already begun shooting video at various locations and he wanted to use it. For some scenes we used Finlay Cowan’s original storyboards, creating vector versions that Flash could animate. For the video, I devised a way to scan every frame of video and convert it to vectors using Adobe Streamline and build a frame sequence in Flash’s timeline. We would then sit there for hours, tweaking and tuning every frame to save precious bytes to ensure smooth playback. The border was used to help preload upcoming animations, but took on a narrative of its own.
The final movie was too large to be held in RAM, so had to be broken down into chunks to allow dynaimc loading during playback on the user’s machine. Even so, it could take as much as 30 minutes to download the 5.7MB on a 56k modem, though back then everyone was used to waiting.
It was downloaded and viewed over 2 million times, and stayed as ‘Shockwave of the day’ for two months.
Gallery
A dump of image files from Bluish's old website







































