Andy Thelwell — User Experience Designer

My good friend and I designed and built this award-winning Flash-based multimedia experience during our BA (Hons.) Interactive Multimedia course.

Developed during the second year of a B.A.(Hons.) Interactive Multimedia degree, Mixer's Bar was created as part of a bigger project for the Multimedia Design and Development module.

The brief for the project was to create a working piece of multimedia software of our choice. The project as a whole was a Flash and Director-based miniature encyclopaedia of modern musical styles, set in the backdrop of a virtual nightclub. The central section of the virtual club was this — Mixer's Bar — an area where the user could mix a 4-part loop of music using the metaphor of a cocktail to represent the mixing of different sounds.

It’s not the most beautiful piece of work, and it has more than its fair share of usability issues, but as my first ever fully-functioning multimedia piece, it keeps a place in my heart, which is why I continue to include it in my portfolio after some 11 years.

Mixer's Bar won Best Fixed Media and Best of Show at the 2001 Broadcast Education Awards.