Bruichladdich Distillery · Festival microsite · Live broadcast
Designing and producing the standalone Rock’ndaal festival microsite, combining ticketing, merchandise and festival-release sales with a live multi-camera broadcast streamed to roughly 3,000 viewers each year.
Rock’ndaal festival 2023 homepage
01 / Context
Animated .SVG landing page detail
Rock’ndaal is Bruichladdich’s day during Fèis Ìle, the Islay whisky festival that runs over ten days at the end of May each year. Across the period I was involved, it grew from a tasting day with merchandise into the largest event of the festival, pulling thousands of people to the distillery for a single-day music festival with a full outdoor stage and LED wall, alongside the longstanding masterclass tasting and a programme of festival-release bottles.
The distillery site acted as the single customer-facing vehicle for the Rock’ndaal event. Some years it ran on its own URL, most years it sat as a microsite within Bruichladdich.com. Tickets, festival releases, merchandise, the live broadcast, and a map of the distillery site all sat in one place, and the same site had to absorb a redesigned festival identity each year.
Get Tickets CTA detail
02 / The Storefront
Built on Shopify Plus. The platform was chosen for checkout reliability during a single annual on-sale window when most of the year’s traffic and revenue landed in a few hours. Around that core, the site carried the year’s festival identity, the masterclass and day-ticket flow, the festival-release product pages, the merchandise range, and the live-stream player. The brief each year was to add and update everything on top without breaking what was underneath.
Festival microsite PDP pages
03 / The Live Masterclass Broadcast
Head distiller, Adam Hannett leading the masterclass
The pre-festival masterclass tasting ran in a working warehouse with a capacity of roughly 180, set by the space itself. To open it to a wider audience, the masterclass was broadcast live on YouTube each year and pulled in around 3,000 additional viewers per stream.
The capture rig was deliberately minimal. Four wireless iPhones on gimbals provided the camera feeds, with an iPad Pro running Switcher Studio as the vision mixer and streaming encoder.
The whole setup was iOS, which kept it portable, quick to rig in a working warehouse with no broadcast infrastructure, and viable on the budget of a single-day event. Operators could move freely between the presenters and the tasting line without cable runs.
A login wall on the broadcast page tied stream access to the customer account, which kept the audience inside the same identity the storefront and merchandise sat behind.
Live Stream login
04 / The Festival Site Map
A custom interactive 3D map of the distillery site was embedded into the Rock’ndaal website so customers could see what was happening where. With the festival spread across the full distillery footprint, the music stage, the masterclass warehouse, the shop, the food stalls, the bottling hall, the map gave attendees a single reference point before arriving and on the day.
Interactive sitemap of the festival
05 / Beyond the Website
Across the same period I also mixed live visuals for the outdoor stage, running VDMX across two laptops with a vision mixer between them, feeding the LED wall behind the bands. It sat outside the website work but on the same project, and is included here as evidence that the role spanned commerce, broadcast, and live performance on a single brief rather than three separate ones.
View of the central courtyard and stage
06 / Reflection
Eight years on the same brief is unusual. It meant the platform could be iterated rather than rebuilt each year, and the constraints (warehouse capacity, Islay logistics, a single on-sale window, an identity that changed annually) became known quantities to design around rather than problems to rediscover. The site did the unglamorous job of taking money reliably while everything more visible sat on top of it.
Interactive · Data visualisation
Interactive maps surfacing the farms and terroir behind barley focused releases.