Big Eye Deers

Big Eye Deers built and designed a global online merchandise store for Tiesto, the world’s biggest DJ, using Magento, the market-leading open source ecommerce platform that delivers Amazon-like levels of functionality at an unbeatable price.

We developed a custom store skin and homepage design, which features a Flash driven product showcase, spotlighting the latest clothing and accessories.  The site marries the distinctive style of DJ Tiesto with a best of breed e-commerce powerhouse.

Tiesto has a massive international fan base. With more than 1.7 million Facebook fans, we integrated Facebook Connect functionality into the store so purchasers can link their Facebook account to their store account, providing wall updates on purchases, easy login with Facebook credentials, delivering a valuable source of free viral marketing.

As an international superstar, the store needed to cater to his diverse range of devotees across the globe. We developed a custom IP-based re-direction solution so visitors to the store are directed to the correct regional portal. With an operation of this size, ensuring the backend worked seamlessly with distribution fulfilment partners is essential. We collaborated closely with Tiesto’s fulfilment, shipping, and printing merchandise network, providing training, support and custom integration to interface their existing systems into the new store backend.

The result is a slick Magento online store that was befitting Tiesto’s status as the world’s biggest DJ!

Visit the new Tiesto online store here.

As an airline that handles the majority of its bookings through the web, the design and functionality of the Manx2 website is critical to the success of this award-winning business.

We created the first website for the Isle-of-Man-based airline back in 2006, but we and the Manx2 team agreed both the site and the brand needed just a bit of freshening up to ensure they maintain their position at the top of the industry, whilst making the most of new opportunities to reach its market using social media.

After carrying out a comprehensive client analysis, including brand value assessment, a survey of existing site visitor behaviour and a detailed review of industry alternatives, we undertook a complete redesign of the site. Our revamp featured prominently spectacular images of the island, bringing the site to life with the outstanding unspoilt beauty of the Isle of Man.

We also added an integrated blog and Twitter and Flickr feeds, to make the most of social media opportunities, and worked with the airline to deliver an integrated strategy for promoting the site using these low cost, high-impact channels. The latest flight arrivals can also be found on the homepage – easily accessible for any traveller on the go.

Chairman Noel Hayes  embraced the idea of social media integration for the site, and with feeds pulling information from various sources like Twitter and Flickr, customers can see the charm, personality and ethos behind the airline.

At Big Eye Deers, we’re really pleased with the results – the new site is more user-friendly and offers loads of interactive elements.  Not only can visitors see photos of Manx2 destinations on the every page, they can read and comment on news stories, even submit photos that could be featured on the homepage.

And for those who enjoy travelling and twittering, Manx2 is now offering their  ___th follower on Twitter a free ticket to a destination of their choice. All you have to do is follow them @flymanx2. Good luck!

Visit the new site here.

Have you ever been sitting idly at your desk making little pets out of push pins and block erasers, or painting with whiteout, or using two pins and a paperclip to draw circles, or making paper footballs to knock into an empty coffee cup?  Anything to kill some time when you can’t get on the internet?  Well here’s a group of artists who put all our paperclip necklaces and origami jabberwockies to shame with stunning works of art made from office supplies.  And a few more artists whose work isn’t so much stunning as it is wicked awesome.

Read more and see more here.

Magento has released its latest upgrade, version 1.4.0.0, bringing with it major improvements and all-new features. We at Big Eye Deers still believe it’s the best open source e-commerce technology on the market, and to say we’re excited about the possibilities it offers is an understatement!

Check out the functionality:

* Implemented 3D Secure credit card validation (Visa and Mastercard)

* Full reimplementation of PayPal modules, includes lot of new functionality and numerous bugfixes

* Full review of frontend themes, introduced design cross-package fallback and the base/default theme. Includes SEO and accessibility enhancements. Changes are oriented to dramatically reduce themes maintenance.

* Added ability to define arbitrary cache backends

* Optimized performance of sales reports, added new sales report typesAdded image/media uploader/browser, that can browse entire media folder

* Optimized performance of search indexer

* Made order processing workflow more informative and severe

* Reimplemented 404 and report pages, introduced 503 page, specifically for maintenance purposes

* Improved javascript files merging, added CSS files merging

* Added Widgets functionality, added several widgets out of the box

* Added Custom Variables functionality

* Added lot of new System Configuration optionsImproved order placement reliability

* Added WYSIWYG for CMS and Catalog

* Optimized cache initialization during startup

* Optimized export from grids in admin area

* Improved tax and discount totals calculation

* Replaced admin notification flash popup into a simple HTML overlay

* Implemented product and category URLs per store view

* Added ability to configure entry point using virtualhost environment configuration, rather than creating another physical entry point

* Optimized simple product view without custom options

It’s the email you’ve been waiting for: that high street giant likes your stuff so much that its decided to splash it over a whole range of products. You’d be jumping for joy, wouldn’t you? You’d sit down with a celebratory glass of vino. You’d probably even call your mum.

That is, of course, unless the note wasn’t from the actual shop, but from someone who’d spied your work on someone else’s product. Which is how the story of stationery supremo Paperchase and Hidden Eloise the Etsy seller begins. It’s the usual little guy v big corp tale and it came to a head on Wednesday night when an exasperated Eloise spilled all on her blog.

Crikey, grounds to sue, you’d think. Chloe brought in the lawyers back in 2007 when Topshop ripped off a pair of dungarees from its See collection, as did Jimmy Choo’s Tamara Mellon when Oasis reproduced a pair of their shoes. Nice thought, but it’s all a bit pie-in-the-sky for Eloise. She’s no Tamara and doesn’t come armed with a band of heavyweight lawyers. When she did pluck up the courage to approach a legal firm, the figure thrown back at her was about $40,000. Etsy sales might be on the up, but sellers are not making this kind of money.

Read more here.

Print by Hidden Eloise and a bag in Paperchase bearing a similar design. Photograph: Hidden Eloise

Artists frequently turn to technology for inspiration or commentary, utilizing components such as chips, ink cartridges and disk drives to make their art. Remember the Mona Lisa created from motherboard bits or the motorcycle from old hard drives?

Now, London artist Nick Gentry has turned forgotten floppy disk drives into art by using them as a canvas for mixed media paintings.

“The whole world was totally reliant on these physical media formats,” he says. “Now suddenly we are at a time where they are obsolete, replaced by countless intangible data files. Will humans be compatible with our own technology?”

Inspired by Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz’s giant world map made entirely of old computer parts, Gentry adopted floppy disks as his medium.

“I looked at using the disks in a grid to create photo-fits, constructing imaginary faces and identities that could draw connections to the personal information stored on the disks,” he says.

Read more here.

Fake fundraising efforts for the Haiti disaster are spreading like wildfire on Facebook. Dozens of fan pages have been set up, urging users to join and promising a $1 donation for each member. One group this weekend attracted 1.5 million members before it was disabled.

Meanwhile, during the weekend, Facebook officials had to beat back a rumor that the firm had promised a $1 donation for every member that changed their status to include a message about Haiti.

“This status is being tracked, the owners of facebook have confirmed they will send $1 to the rescue fund for the Haiti earthquake disaster for everytime this is cut and paste as a status,” read one form of the bogus claim. “You only have to leave it for a minimum of 1 hour. Lets all do our bit to help.”

Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt said the firm took aggressive steps to quell the rumor.  It posted a note on its blog on Saturday warning about the bogus message.

“Beware of scams and hoaxes and ensure that your donations for Haiti get to the right places,” the social networking company wrote on its blog.   Contrary to a current meme, Facebook is not donating $1 for statuses, however we are sharing reputable resources via the “Other Pages” tab on the Global Disaster Relief on Facebook Page.”

Read more here.

Exploring a new city is always fun. But if you can’t get there, a gorgeous, zoomable 360-degree view photo can be an acceptable substitute.

360 Cities, a Dutch company, has created a stunning panoramic photo of Prague in the Czech Republic.

What makes this panoramic photo interesting to viewers is that you can zoom in and out, move up or down or change your view–much like with Google Street View maps.

The photo has been assembled from 600 shots clicked by a 21-megapixel Canon 5D Mark II camera and a 70-200mm lens, set to 200mm. The camera was mounted on a special robotic device that turned it tiny increments every few hours. The resulting data from the camera was about 40-gigabytes.

The finished Photoshop file is 120 GB. Loading the raw files into a computer and stitching the photo took about a week. Martin used a four year-old Windows PC with two single-core 3 GHz Xeon processors and 8 GB of RAM. He also bought a solid state drive to speed up some tasks.

The photo measures 192,000 x 96,000 pixels, or 18.4 billion pixels altogether.

So start exploring Prague. If you zoom in enough, you can even see laundry hanging out to dry in some of the buildings.

Read more here.

For all you graphic design aficionados out there, check out the Typo/Graphic Posters site, which features a fantastic collection of compelling and provocative posters, curated from more than 300 designers and agencies globally. The site aims to be ‘a timeless source for studies, inspiration and promotion of good design through poster culture and cultivation of typography and pure forms of design.’

The collection can be organized and viewed by category (solo designer, studio, exhibition, font foundry, school), and ordered alphabetically or randomly – the layout is simply and elegantly arranged, like having a mini art gallery displayed on your monitor!

See the collection here.

It’s been a spectacular year for Placebo, with a multi-million selling album that topped the charts across Europe, a string of career defining festival performances and an MTV Music Award for Best Alternative group.

Big Eye Deers is delighted to be Placebo’s web partner, providing all they need in development, design and strategy.  This year we’ve worked together on many projects including the re-invigorated Placeboworld site, with its fresh emphasis on social media and fan-supplied content, a custom Google maps-driven gigs archive, a film festival site and a hugely successful album launch online playback campaign.

As a Christmas present to the legions of Placebo fans worldwide, the band wanted to offer an Advent calendar with a twist – each day would feature exclusive online content, including new videos, backstage footage, promotional vouchers, competitions and live photography.

The design brief was to go festive, but keep it Placebo – black and gold with abstract lights hit the spot.  The database-driven backend, working through a custom CMS system, provides automatically updated content that is refreshed on the stroke of midnight each day.  jQuery-driven animations take care of the visual overlays, keeping things elegant and clean on the scripting side.

It’s been a huge viral success, with an impressive buzz building on fan forums, blogs, and tweets – and the best is yet to come, with some really special announcements towards the end of the month…

Experience the Placebo Christmas experience here.