SWG3

In a city that has art and music pumping through its veins, SWG3 is one of Scotland’s leading independent venues – a place where creativity, community and commerce collide. They had outgrown their website and were looking to attract a broad demographic from corporate clients looking to hire space to ravers buying tickets for the next event – no easy task to create a site that speaks to such a diverse range of users!

Their vision:

Where inspiration is infectious
Where experimentation thrives
Where memories are made

This created a perfect design ethos for our updates. Our bold video headers helped bring the space to life and show the multi-disciplinary nature of the spaces. Their arrow logo helped provide a simple navigation tactic to guide users throughout the site. Coupled with a mobile first style hamburger menu that is accessible at any point from a sticky navigation system and a full screen nav which expands and contracts each section on mobile devices to access subpages, we created a design that was bold yet functional.

They needed an overall visual aesthetic that was worthy of their iconic cultural stature, but not at the detriment of maximising revenue.

Key to the what’s on section, inspired by print-programme layouts and typography, was being easy to navigate cross-device while coping with large traffic spikes. With bookings happening directly on Ticketmaster, this sophisticated integration pulled data via the Ticketmaster API, allowing us to rapidly serve up-to-date information and sophisticated filtering behind our visually striking, brand-led design. Instagram feeds were integrated directly to the homepage, giving a sense of the SWG3 buzz. Event pages integrated with YouTube, and Spotify APIs to bring event and artist content to life.

Everyone who comes to SWG3 knows it for a different reason, in a different way. A space for work, play and everything in between; a place without limits. Our distinctive design created a unified, flexible platform that can adapt and grow alongside their ever-evolving brand identity and business goals. What started as artists’ studios in a derelict warehouse is now one of Europe’s most credible, loved, multi-discipline arts-venues. Its next evolutionary step will see SWG3 expand into a major cultural destination and Scottish tourist attraction. That vision and masterplan was an important element to communicate.

There’s never been a greater need to (re)connect through culture in our lifetime. Though the future is uncertain, we remain inspired.