Connecting a World-Famous DJ with His Fans James Zabiela, Bluecadet

James Zabiela built an international following on a distinctly experimental approach to DJing, live performance, and technology, ranked #94 on DJ Mag's Top 100 DJs in 2011. He wanted a site that matched the intensity of his live shows and gave his fans worldwide a place to gather.

At the time, Bluecadet was just five people. We combined technology, social media integration, and user-centered design into a site that connected with both the artist and his fans, and won Best Music Site at the 2011 SXSW Interactive Awards.

The design strategy centered on a cinematic experience. Major page transitions triggered dynamically generated intro/idle/outro sequences set to James' House and Breakbeat music, giving users a sense of being inside the DJ booth.

The project was one of the first to lean on fan-generated content by aggregating photographs from Flickr, posts from Twitter, and videos from YouTube onto the website. This approach was relatively novel at the time and required building features from scratch.

Drupal handled the backend and gave admins the means to moderate the firehose of fan content coming in from multiple sources. It also delivered the video segments used to build page transitions and backgrounds.

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One of the big wins on this project was the content creation flow we built for James. Twitter integration let him update his website directly from his phone. The key there is that it took advantage of behavior James had already adopted, rather than forcing him to develop new habits.