DSCVRD Magazine
Shining a light on the sub-cultures of music, art, fashion, skateboarding, and everything in between, DSCVRD was an in-print magazine that we successfully transitioned into the digital realm. This transformation involved not only converting the existing print content into an engaging online format but also equipping the editorial team with powerful, intuitive tools, allowing the editors to effortlessly publish new content, promote articles, and manage the magazine's digital presence with ease.
We enhanced the online platform by enabling the addition of highlights to the homepage, including the capability to feature live videos as well as the ability to search the entire archive.
This upgrade allowed DSCVRD to showcase the latest and greatest in the hardcore scene (and beyond), providing a richer and more interactive experience for its audience. Through a digital solution, we helped DSCVRD to continue to illuminate the vibrant sub-cultures it celebrated, now with the enhanced reach and immediacy of an online platform.
As hardcore and punk fans ourselves, this was a dream job we had full creative control over from design to code.
The homepage as a hub
The homepage needed to be a place to see everything DSCVRD. Due to the quantity of articles published weekly, we added a few extra features to help authors highlight more significant articles to stop from being buried. Users were encouraged to scroll, with more articles being loaded as they made their way down the page in a 'feed' style.
One of the challenges was to ensure things like featured articles, paid advertisements and other unique article layouts weren't lost as the user scrolled down, so we made sure these would reappear as duplicated content even as the user made their way down the page.
Navigating sub-cultures
The subject matter of DSCVRD is steeped in personality, and we wanted to make sure this came through in the design. We had access to some great photography from the DSCVRD media team and we included this as part of the navigation.
Opening the nav, the user sees a huge menu set in the DSCVRD brand. Hovering over a category (Shred, Noise, etc) would show one of these images to give the user an idea of the content within.
Instagram-style content feeds
Inspired by the "story"-based content feeds made popular by the likes of Instagram, we wanted to include an option for the editors to put together "at a glance" one-off content. This was perfect for showcasing gig photography, giving the editors the ability to add photographs with short bits of copy in various formats.
Additionally, we added the option for users to share this content with friends. Whilst the content itself was typically embedded within the homepage, we provided a dedicated full-screen page which could be linked to and shared.
Articles could be showcased in an Instagram-style feed
They could be shared directly from the homepage
Keeping things consistent
Similar to the navigation, we wanted to include personality within the category pages. To keep things consistent and to help users better understand where they are in the site, we matched the imagery in both size and content to the image from the navigation.
The articles below, naturally, all live within the named category, but to take things further we also added the option to have those Instagram-style feeds in to specific categories for further customisation for the editors.
Keeping things readable
Whilst we had a lot of fun with the layout on DSCVRD, we wanted to ensure that the articles were readable. We used a magazine-style layout by utilising columns alongside the imagery, allowed for different formatting styles with pull-out quotes and "text highlighting" options and included various embedding options including YouTube, Vimeo, Bandcamp, Twitter/X, Soundcloud and more.
Turning a website into a venue
We gave the editors the ability to embed Live YouTube videos directly into the site, which users could watch whilst browsing the site in a picture-in-picture view. This gave the team the chance to bring the venue atmosphere to users, working in collaboration with festivals and gig organisers. As the site was built and launched during the COVID-19 lockdown, this also meant opportunity for artists to stream from home directly to the DSCVRD site.
Search through the noise
Through a series of tagging and content indexing, we created a search that was always up to date, easy to use and quick to find what you were looking for. It could easily be launched from anywhere on the site, delivering users with a page of articles relevant to them.
