Brave Wave

Details

Brave Wave is a music label dedicated to exploring the interplay between video games, music, and nostalgia. They’re best known for bringing out beautiful vinyl releases from the likes of Harumi Fujita, Manami Matsumae and Yuzo Koshiro.

Ran by my friend Alex and his long standing business partner and pal Mohammed, I was asked to become involved in the site after a few projects with Alex.

Brave Wave were using a Squarespace site originally, and Mo was running into content problems when adding new releases. When a release included artists who had already featured before, their details had to be entered manually each time. This meant adding new content to the site was labourious, and prone to human error. When this starts happening, people can become reluctant to update a site, even if it is their business front, because it becomes an arduous task.

During a couple of calls with Mo, he was able to articulate the problems from his persepective, and whilst listening carefully, I could visualise the issues –  and the solutions – that I could implement in WordPress.

I used custom post types for the artists and albums, and allowed an album to attach artists to that album. Any time I showed an album I could easily list the artists who feature on the album, data accurate, and all Mo had to do was choose the artists from a dropdown select menu when creating the album. Likewise, I could show which artists each album was featured on, which improved the usability and exploration of the site for the visitor.

Whilst Mo was fairly happy with the look and feel, I took the opportunity to tighten up all the grid layouts to keep things in order, especially now we had the opportunity to add more data to both albums and artists easily.

This project solved all of Mo’s problems and has made the site a breeze to update, yet remain consistent and on-brand with minimal effort.