Released at the end of November 2010, Arts Council England’s report titled “Digital audiences: engagement with arts and culture online” is still very releavent because it’s the first report exploring online engagement with arts and culture.

We’ve pull together a brief snapshot of some information worth highlighting to help organsiations in Arts & Culture succeed digitally.

Based on a 2000-strong sample of the English adult online population:

Over HALF used the internet to engage with Arts & Culture in the last 12 months: With the prominent activities based around finding information about live events, artists or performers as well as ticketing.

The most prevalent online activities allowed users to access live events: Online access is not currently replacing live events, but it is becoming a way for those not attending to engage.

Music is showing the most online engagement, but other art forms remain strong: Of those who viewed an online clip of an arts event, 81% had viewed a music clip, 30% a dance clip, 27% a theatre clip and 19% a visual arts clip.

Social media (in particular Facebook) has become a major tool for discovering and sharing information: Over 50% of the online population uses social networks and 25% of them share information.

99% of audiences who engage with Arts & Culture content online participate in real-life engagement as well: Only 1% of the online population have engaged solely online in the last 12 months.

The most important thing that this report highlights is that your website is a 2-way conversation and a way for your audiences to interact with you. Clearly, online presence and information compliments your real-life work and provides a way for visitors to enhance and contribute to their experiences. There’s a strong link that investment (time as well as money) in a digital presence will lead to increased engagement on and offline.  To maximise the work put into updating sites such as social networks, it is best to install a “pull” onto your website so that those who aren’t on, say, facebook can still see what you’re doing. Click through for a tutorial on how to do this for Facebook. Not all websites support this, so if you’re building a new one, make sure that this kind of integration is included.  Likewise, if you’re sticking with your existing site, ask a developer to make the changes if you can’t manage them in-house.

Something must have worked because the February-March edition features this new style of a vertical 3 column layout, widened type palette, and 2-colour print for that extra edge.  There are fantastically whimsical illustrations peppering the brochure by Kristyna Baczyski.

We enjoyed our trip to Magma bookstore even more than usual, when we opened super cool Flux magazine and spotted our advert for the latest exhibition at Henry Moore Institute (Undone: Making and Unmaking in Contemporary Sculpture). The acid green design (found on page 9 if you’re interested) literally leaps off the page to grab your attention, whilst retaining the Institute’s contemporary, elegant look and feel. Nice advert alert!

We’ve an inherent love of gadgets and innovation (yes, we’re geeks, and proud of it!), so imagine my delight, when faced with the opportunity to abandon my desk, and attend a three day workshop at MadLab. Run by Sam Easterby-Smith (who developed The Times iPad app and most recently, the In The City app for the iPhone), this was an unmissable chance to get some one-on-one playtime with the Apple development kit.

Why did we take time out to do this? Well, with MobileSQUARED reporting in mid-2010, that only 9% of mobile phones in use had no access to the internet, we’re more than aware of the crucial need to make things that not only work, but offer an enhanced experience on internet enabled phones. Ofcom’s Communications Market 2010 report published in August 2010, also highlights that Apple’s devices (think iPhone and iPad) continue to hold the majority market share of mobile internet traffic, with 59% of mobile internet traffic coming from Apple’s devices (May 2010).

With such large market share, we’ve decided to invest time in exploring and creating new marketing products with Apple’s development kit. We wanted to see what we could make our devices do, and to inspire application (app) ideas for our clients. The three day workshop was just the beginning, but allowed us to get to work with some real feature sets of iOS devices. We covered several key aspects of Apple’s devices, like user location, device movement detection, gesture handling, live data pulls and device data management.

It was immediately evident how far mobile technology has come – the sensitivity of the accelerometer (the bit of the phone that measures movement) was very impressive, with even the slightest shake causing a response in my code – but, the key improvement was the ease of communicating with services online. We created a small program with ease, that pulled a live twitter search, and stored the results without having to create a custom method to do so. Throughout these three days, more and more ideas started buzzing in our heads, the sky’s the limit really, and we’re excited to apply our new found know-how to enhance the experience of arts and cultural brands.

We were commissioned to create the exhibition identity, integrated marketing campaign and merchandise for the latest major exhibition at Henry Moore Institute – Undone: Making and Unmaking in Contemporary Sculpture. Drawing reference from the exhibition theme, and the nature of the works of art, we took a 3-dimensional, handmade approach to the creation of the exhibition and campaign identity.

Alternate Gothic was our chosen typeface for its strength in legibility outdoor, and after experimentation with textiles, wires, and sellotape – black electrical tape became our media of choice to create the letterforms. We used the very fantastic Photolink photography studio in Manchester for our shoot, and armed with forty rolls of tape, cameras, video recorders, and a stunning acid green paint palette, we set about making the 3D identity, piece by piece. After 7 hours of hard graft and craft, we got the shots we were after, and these photos and video give you some insight into the process involved to achieve the end results.

With the demands of the average web user becoming more and more advanced, and with the requirement to deliver ever increasing interactivity and the wow factor – web developers are finding it ever more difficult to accommodate some of the older popular browsers. You’ve probably guessed already that the specific browser I’m referring to is Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). Similarly older browsers do fall within the same band, however, they have long passed in terms of significant usage because of their failure to keep up with web standards and new technologies. But the big question is why hasn’t IE6 passed us by in the same way?

The main reason is the reliance of proprietary software and web applications within UK government on IE6. Generally these propriety software bundles and web applications have been specifically programmed to work with IE6 and time/money has been invested in fixing the problems that IE6 presented in terms of functionality (and that would actually no longer work in more modern browsers). In addition, other companies then insist that they need to use IE6, because government departments use it and won’t be able to see their sites or services without it.

Due to the potential investment that would be required to bring these systems up to date, in terms of browser technologies, it has long been the reason why IE6 is still in significant use, even with its long list of drawbacks and security issues. It does seem like times are changing though, recently some big online players have decided enough is enough, and they are dropping support totally for IE6 so that they can improve the online experience for their users. Companies taking this approach include Google, You Tube, Amazon and Apple. There is also a swell of developers petitioning the UK government to drop usage of IE6.

Here at Wonder, we are always excited about implementing new technologies online, but still have to keep in mind those who find themselves only having access to the web via an IE6 browser. With this in mind, we utilise a methodology of development referred to as Progressive Enhancement to ensure that a website’s content is always accessible, but that the more enhanced experience is only served to those devices and browsers that support it. Saying this, with new web technologies requiring the use of newer browsers (e.g. HTML5, CSS3 & Advanced JavaScript libraries), the experience for IE6 users is bound to lag behind, so we as a team are asking the key question to those who continue to use IE6…what are you missing out on?

“In Recorders, artworks hear, see and feel the public, they exhibit awareness and record and replay memories entirely obtained during the show. The pieces either depend on participation to exist or predatorily gather information on the public through surveillance and biometric technologies.” Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

We emptied our pockets, scanned our fingerprints, captured our heartbeats, recorded our voices, and watched as our images were projected in huge scale on the gallery walls. The Recorders exhibition preview was everything promised – ominous, playful – and truly brought alive our campaign message of >_awaiting your input. We’ve seen lots of fantastic press on Recorders, but our favourite has to be this line from The Guardian (Friday 17 September): ‘Fugitives would be well advised to steer clear.’

We like to invest time in tracking trends and exploring possibilities with new innovations, so through our blog, I’m going to be posting regular snippets of the best stuff that’s out there, and which you could adopt, to further connect with your online audiences for the good of your brand. Currently, there’s a new crop of location-based social networks that are rapidly growing in popularity. These services use your location, and those of the people around you, to create new connections and experiences online. With location-enabled mobile devices ever increasing, it has now become a reality that information can easily be used to keep people you know up-to-date on your whereabouts and recommendations.

Foursquare primarily focuses on location enabled mobile devices like the iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Palm to enable you to “check-in” to public venues that you visit. Along with checking into venues, you’re are able to see which of your Foursquare friends have checked into venues nearby and you can also leave “tips” for other people who are visiting the venue to use on their visit.

What makes this interesting for arts, culture and leisure, is that Foursquare has recently enabled venues to gain access to their statistics, so that you can track and do something with the knowledge of these online visitors. You can find out; Most recent visitors, Most frequent visitors, The time of day people check-in, Total number of unique visitors, Demographic breakdown of visitors, Portion of Foursquare check-ins broadcast to Twitter and Facebook.

If this data alone doesn’t create a fire in your belly – think about how arts, culture and leisure venues can benefit from adopting Foursquare in their visitor model? It can aid you in getting the word out about your current exhibitions, events, productions, etc, with a wealth of opportunity to then reward and provide incentives to your most frequent Foursquare visitors. Here are a few ideas:

A Mayor special offer: unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue. Who’s the Mayor? It’s your single most loyal visitor (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days). For example: “Foursquare tells us your the Mayor, enjoy this free ticket to our next event.”

Offers based on check-ins: unlocked when a user checks into your venue a certain number of times. For example: “Foursquare says you’ve been here 10 times? On your next visit why not bring a friend for free?”

Frequency based offers: are unlocked every set number of check-ins. e.g. “Foursquare users get a free coffee every 5th check-in!”

So what have you got to loose? Get your team around a table to see how Foursquare could be part of your visitor model?

I’ve recently finished a ten week course in bookbinding. Ten weeks since I decided I wanted to do something with my evenings that didn’t involve TV or the Internet. The course was lead by the talented Lucy May Schofield, and as you can see from my images, I was the sole guy amongst the club. I’ve never tried a proper hands-on craft, despite years of ‘creative’ education, graphic design seemed to always steer in the direction of the computer for me.

Apart from the needlework (which my clumsy fingers still haven’t mastered) the course was a real eye opener into the world of binding techniques. Every week a new binding method was attempted, coptic, pamphlet, japanese, bomb-fold, concertina and the oddly named ‘trouser books’, the list goes on. So here’s some pictures of the structures I’m most happy with, and a couple of ‘work in progress’ shots for evidence! Watch out for a Wonder publication using hand-bound methods coming soon…

With our specialism in arts and culture, we get many an opportunity to attend exhibition previews. This week, following our work on an identity and campaign for Henry Moore Institute, we attended the preview of two new exhibitions – Hermann Obrist: Art Nouveau Sculpture and Out of my Mouth: The Photosculptures of Alina Szapocznikow.

Herman Obrist is thought to have only sold one of his sculptures during his lifetime, but these remarkable surviving plaster forms are arguably the first abstract sculptures, influencing the development of the European Art Nouveau movement and are shown here for the first time in the UK. Whilst the other original mind, Alina Szapocznikow coined the term photosculpture in 1971 to describe her photographs of chewing gum bent into curious and beautiful shapes.

These are fantastical unmissable exhibitions, displaying truly remarkable works from experimental artists who clearly influenced 20th century sculpture, and which we believe will inspire all those who attend in 2010!