https://muse.mu
https://he-3.mu

On the 6th June Muse had an important announcement to make: the release date for their new album ‘The 2nd Law’. The following day they also announced a string of UK and EU tour dates.

I worked very closely with the band’s management to maximise the impact of the online announcement. The plan was to build a lightbox splash page showcasing the album trailer and the release date. I asked Kate Brighouse to design the lightbox content while I set about writing the code to easily integrate a lightbox with muse.mu.

I’ve always found Fancybox to be the easiest and most flexible opensource lightbox plugin to work with. It allowed me to easily launch the lightbox with a few lines of code. I provided Muse’s developers with a few files and lines of code to make the integration and updates a lot simpler.

I used the jQuery Cookie plugin to check how often the user visits the home page. I set the lightbox to only display once per session and three times in total. I also added a “Don’t Show This Again” button to override the visit count and ensure that it isn’t displayed to that user again.

We wanted to ensure that the Muse mailing list is current, so the splash included a sign-up form that uses ajax to sign users up seamlessly.

To reveal the album release date I included a jquery countdown timer, working it’s way to midnight on the 17th September – the UK release date for ‘The 2nd Law’.

Beyond the splash page I made a mini version of the countdown which was embedded on the side of the website’s home page. I also made a standalone version of the lightbox content to sit on https://he-3.mu

Following the initial announcement I updated the lightbox to a tour announcement.

It was brilliant to see my work on such a huge website and a great start to the new Muse campaign. I’m really looking forward to working on the campaign over the coming months.