A Parallax Recap of 2013
2013 was a game changing year for Parallax. From a successful rebrand to launching revolutionary websites and applications, we had one of our best years so far.
We’ve put together just a few of Parallax’s favourite moments of 2013:
Snapshot Media Becomes Parallax
We were known as Snapshot Media at the start of the year and have undergone a fantastic rebrand to become Parallax.
One of our directors Dario Grandich said about the change, “We built Snapshot Media from the ground up and while it has served us well we felt it was time for a change. We’ve grown quickly since we started in 2010 from a small living room in York, with a number of office upgrades, many new faces joining our talented team & our services developing to offer far more in terms of scope. We’re now a greatly evolved outfit and a very well respected agency in the region.
In turn, we wanted a brand that truly reflected who we are, and where we’re going.”
Changing our brand has been a challenging process, with lots of small things to think about including new brand guidelines, SEO obstacles and the time constraints of running our client projects alongside the rebrand.
The change has gone incredibly well and we’re now seeing a brilliant return. We’re exactly where we want to be as a digital agency. Our brand and website have since been nominated for multiple awards across the web.
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Launching Industry Leading Websites
Parallax worked hard designing and developing websites and applications for clients throughout 2013. From e-commerce, to responsive sports sites, we’ve established ourselves as one of the most versatile digital agencies out there.
In October we launched Lemoncake, a start up which aims to redefine the production music industry. The website has an intuitive user interface with some cutting edge technology. One of the biggest features we built is a completely unique music search algorithm. Unlike other production music libraries, Lemoncake allows listeners to discover the right track for their piece using sliders providing instant feedback. One of our directors James Hall was a lead developer on the project, he said “the sliders can gradually change the tone, speed and feel of a track, ensuring that the sound that listeners search for is the sound that they find. By choosing a genre of music and shaping the result with the four sliders you get exactly the outcome you want.”
October also saw the launch of the brand new Keelham Farm Shop website, recent winners of the Best Independent Retailer at The Observer Food Monthly Awards 2013. We built an elegant e-commerce solution using a new payment service, Stripe, which allowed customers to order Christmas hampers as gifts and also pre order Christmas food to collect in the shop. Stripe makes taking payments online more simple than it has ever been.
November saw the launch of the brand new Yorkshire County Cricket Club website. With many of their visitors arriving on the site using a mobile device, we developed a responsive site with a flexible grid that realigns depending on screen size. This ensures that users get the full experience when viewing the website.
Parallax Appears in Creative Review
Director Dario Grandich spoke to Creative Review about the process of rebranding a digital agency, discussing the pros and cons of such a challenging move. Creative Review is one of the most well-respected art and design magazines so it was very special to be featured.
New Team Members
2013 has seen our team grow considerably to meet the demand for work that’s required. Recent additions to our team include designers, a content manager, a copywriter and new developers, who are all now enjoying life at Parallax and we’re happy to have them on board.
Moving
As well as a complete rebrand, Parallax also managed to squeeze in the time to move offices this year. The new office is bigger, brighter and a better fit for our growing team.
Lawrence Dudley, one of our directors said: ‘We were starting to feel a little cramped in our old offices, but didn’t want to leave the location which is in the heart of the creative district in Leeds. Our new offices are bigger and better, with enough room to get table football installed so we can let off some steam every now and then!’.
The Success of jsPDF
We’ve had a successful year on many fronts, both for ourselves and for our clients. Our product jsPDF, a HTML5 client-side solution for generating PDFs we developed in house received an unbelievable response across the internet. Featuring on industry sites such as Hacker News as a No.1 story, to enquiries from giant international corporations, it’s been a huge success.
jsPDF has been a long and exciting build, the pet project of our director James Hall. It’s an open source library that allows you to generate PDF files without the need for server-side technology. Javascript is everywhere, and implementing this into builds allows for a much better web experience for developers and users.
Becoming Mates with the Media
Working with the media and press became incredibly vital to our digital agency in 2013.
Parallax appeared on Gizmodo, The Verge and many other sites after one of our Project Managers Tom Faller discovered a bug in Google Chrome’s incognito Mode. The bug shared searches carried out in incognito with the regular browsing on iOS 7 causing major concerns about privacy.
We took car parks viral with our Bonkers for Conkers campaign for our client Town Centre Car Parks. From an idea bounced around in the office, it quickly went viral, appearing in the local news, national news on the BBC website and internationally on TIME.com amongst many others.
We were also really pleased to see our content management system Expose featured as CMS of the month in .net magazine. We have worked on the CMS for a number of years and truly believe that it is one of the easiest and most versatile systems out there.
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Opening a car with your iPhone
One of the exciting projects that we worked on this year was an app that can open cars at the touch of a button for City Car Club.
Jack Sails, Project Manager said: ‘We wrote a bespoke API that handles all of the booking information on a separate intermediary server. This allows the system to ‘shake-hands’ with City Car Club’s very complex vehicle management system. The new app does everything, from booking to unlocking the car, removing the need for smart key cards.’
Sharing our Knowledge
Our directors have also been giving talks around Leeds about exciting developments in the world of web. Our very own James Hall gave a talk at hey!stac on Cryptography, and Andy Fitch talked at Forefront on creating responsive websites with object-oriented CSS.
What’s coming in 2014?
Coming up in 2014 are a series of exciting new launches for our clients including a new Match Day Mode for the start of the new cricket season for Yorkshire County Cricket Club, an event pre booking system for Town Centre Car Parks, global website design and development for Hisense and much more.
We can’t wait to get started!