Social portal & brand identity

Londonparties

Londonparties.co.uk is a group offer within Nick House Entertainment (nhe group), established in early 1999. The group offers consultancy on all areas within the bar, restaurant and nightclub industry. Our work included branding, design for print, promotions, online strategy, development of social network with architecture and build.

Brand identity

Develop the existing marque whilst retaining 8 year’s of equity built up in the original marque • Apply new branding across sub-brands whilst creating a consistent LP look & feel • Create look & feel guidelines so that in-house designers can work within parameters. We contemporised the identity and designed a monogram that would be consistently applied across the series of sub-brands. We created an upmarket ‘luxury brand’ feel by replicating the LP monogram similar to upmarket fashion branding. We then created a series of five designs for each one of the sub-brands handled by Londonparties. The new branding has been applied across the all company touch-points including websites, T-shirts, matches, wallpapers etc.

Social network website

Firedog was responsible for designing the original www.londonparties.co.uk social networking portal which first introduced the concept of social networking within the nightclub/entertainment sector in March 2006. Based on the highly successful uptake of the first portal, the NHE Group commissioned Firedog in May 2007 to design and build their refreshed Web 2.0 social networking portal.

We decided on creating a black site environment as it felt more luxurious and paid homage to the night time nature of the brand.
We decided on creating a black site environment as it felt more luxurious and paid homage to the night time nature of the brand.

We felt that the new portal needed to offer extremely sexy functionality but it needed to be functional and something their members would be comfortable using, therefore usability was a key consideration across the design. Firedog’s strategic consultancy extended to the overall portal logic and the inclusion of revenue generation tools within the portal, whilst the relatively low page load times allow a fast browsing experience. Firedog wanted to create a sleek, glossy, aspirational site which members would want to come back to time and time again to effectively relive their offline LP experiences online the next day.

The results

Firedog deliverables included:

– Web strategy / objective setting
– Full portal architecture
– 40 wireframes
– Front-end design concepts
– Build, test & deployment

Key portal functionality highlights include:

– 3rd party ad serving capability
– FaceBook guest-list API so LP events can be set up via FaceBook
– Friends with benefits (a marketplace for trading)
– Profile activity index (who’s active and just how active have they been)
– My promo (promote yourself, your band, your event, create your own blog etc.)
– Upload videos (links to YouTube offering your own video on profile page)