The Sampler
Connecting club to classical
The Sampler
Brand Identity
Typeface Design
UX Design
Website Design
Information Architecture
Client: Sound and Music
The Sampler is Sound and Music’s platform to promote new music activity across the UK, from DIY nights for emerging composers, to workshops, sound installations and experimental club nights.
As the name implies, The Sampler promotes a wide range of events, editorial, podcasts and playlists. The brand mark is based on the electronic music visualisation, referring back to the idea of sampling. We began to experiment with waveform shapes and how they could be used to create letterforms, arriving at a solution that is distinctive and unusual, but still clearly recognisable as an S. We developed an entire alphabet of these custom letterforms, which are used across the site, social media and merchandise.
The Sampler is a digital brand, almost always used online and interacted with on screen, so we developed a fresh, youthful palette of bright RGB colours that can be used alongside more neutral tones across the website. The distinctive, bright colours helped us to develop a colour coding system for the website, clearly categorising information and helping user navigation.
The unusual feed-based layout of the site allows us to experiment with offset spacing and unexpected combinations, with advertising, calls to action and typography used too break up the content. The minimal, intuitive menu, colour coded filtering and use of related content promotes user discovery. The site includes more features for logged-in users, including curated content personalised to their interests and location and the ability to submit user-generated content to the site.
