New work by Airside: Destroy Rankin, for Youth Music

Can you tell us a bit about the Destroy Rankin project?

Airside were approached by children’s music charity, Youth Music to design and build a microsite for their ‘Destroy Rankin’ project.

Destroy Rankin involves some of the world’s biggest musicians creating an artwork from an original photograph of themselves taken by renowned, iconic photographer, Rankin. The concept being that the artist ‘destroy’ their original image and impose upon it some sort of idea or statement about themselves. 

As part of the project, there is a coffee table book of the original and destroyed images designed by Big Active, live performances by some of the artists and a series of auctions where copies of the books are to be sold to raise money for the charity.  The events will happen during Youth Music Week 2009 (9th - 15th November).

The site we were asked to create needed to act as the hub for all of this activity; to bind it all together.  It needed to promote the project and in turn, Youth Music as a charitable organisation.

How did the project come to Airside?

Our managing director, Nat Hunter is friends with the head of media strategy at Youth Music and he liked our body of work and our approach.

For Airside, we felt it offered a great opportunity for us to work with some fantastic content and to feel like we’re doing something good in doing some work for charity.

Who did you collaborate with on the project?

As the client is a charity, the budget was obviously not substantial.  Also the timescale was pretty tight - we had to get everything put together from wireframes to launch in around two weeks.  This put us in a slightly tricky position because we also had a lot of other digital work underway and not much room to work on another site.  We quickly realised that to complete the job on budget and in time, we would need to partner with another company to take our design work and do the front end build.  This is a practice that we’re adopting more and more regularly at Airside and is proving to be quite successful.

Alex Torrance from Alex+Alex immediately sprang to mind as someone we could collaborate with, because we knew that the best execution of the design would use quite a lot of jQuery and he is a great developer in this area.  We’ve worked together with Alex+Alex on a few projects recently and have found that culturally, we are a good fit too.  It helps that Alex took real pride in ensuring that his code was faithful to our designs – he always went the extra mile and added little touches and finessing of his own.

Tell us a bit about the jQuery mechanic and why you chose it over Flash?

We considered Flash to start with, but it seemed excessive for the simple movement and interaction that the site required.

An important consideration was SEO.  As jQuery just sits alongside HTML markup - the site could be spidered by search engines just like a static site would.  It is not impossible to create SEO-friendly Flash sites too these days, but for this project it would have doubtless been more time consuming to produce.

That said, we did decide to use Flash for the intro screen so that we could offer a full browser intro video and through the site there are vimeo clips that require Flash.

You can follow both Airside and Guy Moorhouse on Twitter.

— Posted on October 14th, 2009 by Daniel in: Making ofInterview

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