Responses by Sennep

Background: The general purpose was to create a go-to destination for everything related to Sir Elton John. From latest news and tour listings to an immersive timeline focusing on his career, the website is content rich and has something for everyone. For this site, we engaged with the project team and representatives from Elton John’s fanbase to plan an experience that would truly connect with the core audience and beyond.

Highlights: Working with Elton’s new logo and identity, that was designed by graphic designer George Adams, and applying it to the website. Taking the color palette, textures, typography and layout structure, we evolved the guidelines for the small screen.

Challenges: Our approach focuses on the star grid component of the identity, creating dynamic layouts unique to Elton’s online presence. This element of the build proved challenging as both slice based elements and motion run throughout the site. It was necessary to craft something completely bespoke in code to achieve this, rather than implementing a more standard square grid.

Favorite details: The hero module. It’s used as a driver to encourage users to dig deeper into content. Intriguing crops, elegant imagery motions and video content activation based on mouse rollover movement all come together to provide what we feel to be an engaging and memorable experience.

Time constraints: We needed to move quickly to hit deadlines. To do that, we built a series of prototypes with a responsive, modular grid to fit a variety of content. This framework allowed us to iterate and improve rapidly, testing the look and feel on the fly.

Technical features: We built the website on React.js, Next.js, Node.js, GSAP and Heroku. The front-end and back-end are cleanly separated via an API. Server side rendered React via Next.js, which was awesome and fast! SSR and caching was also critical for such a high traffic site and Heroku was simple and scalable.