More Plasmas than You Can Shake a Stick At
Eight(!) plasmas, four laptops, 400 square metres of stage and a whole lotta Keynote: IDLS 2008 at Darling Harbour.
On location with the PM
Occasional Icelab collaborator Les Herstik shooting the powers that be for an upcoming video project.
Project: Adhami Pender Architecture
A long time in gestation, the new website for Adhami Pender Architecture features a custom CMS built in Symphony for site text and portfolio items. For users of advanced browsers, there’s some pretty tasty live-rendered background Flash animation. Nice buildings too: they’re lovely people who do good work.
Great new location, same old people
Come visit us at our new office at 3/1 Gordon St, Canberra City. We’re enjoying the natural sunlight and access to public transport, bicycle goodness and cafés. Oh, and the 25m lap pool, gym and sauna. And working extra-hard to pay the increased rent.
Icelab wins at PAGE awards
Our recent interactive for the National Museum of Australia, The Crimson Thread of Kinship just won the 2007 PAGE Award for Best Multimedia Production Over $5000.
As ever, when a job goes well it’s a combination of hard work, inspiration and a good client relationship. Go team!
AGDA Awards Get Photographic Love from Max
Max worked his booty off* last year with design goddess Jacinda Jackson on the Australian Graphic Designers Association awards audiovisuals (Michael came in at the last minute and helped out a bit to ensure he got an invite). Now the hard work’s paid off with some nice spreads in the Awards book. Check it.
*It’s just starting to grow back now. At last.
Recent work
Project: Crimson Thread of Kinship embroidery
Flash interactive built for the National Museum of Australia. Nice to work on a project for such an impressive piece: the embroidery is 12m long and represents thousands of hours of work. Our approach for the interactive is to get out of way as much as possible and let the work speak for itself—although we couldn’t resist the pointer-as-needle conceit.
The Crimson Thread of Kinship was a finalist at the 14th AIMIA awards and won the 2007 PAGE Award for Best Multimedia Production Over $5000.
>> Launch the interactive from the NMA site.
Project: IP Australia patent search interface
This is one we’ve been working on for a while, but which has only recently seen the light of (post-beta) day. IP Australia’s Auspat patent search system is, we confidently assert, the best in the world – or at least, the one with the fanciest HTML. Frontend design, HTML and DOM-stretching JavaScript by Max Wheeler; legacy-system-herding, big-iron JSP backend by IP Australia’s development team.
Less mass, more energy
There’s a temptation to try to optimise your business by cranking out the same thing, efficiently, again and again. It’s the agribusiness model: get good at doing one thing, then do it as cheaply as you can in the greatest volume. Because you need to keep volumes high, you need to market to people who don’t actually want or need your product – and that’s just what it is, a generic product, the same as the last, the same as the next.
But agribusiness monocultures are boring and brittle: they’re prone to disease, and they’re easily wiped out when the market shifts.
We’re more like hunter-gatherers: we improvise, adapt, try new approaches. For us, a new project is an opportunity to explore different ways of doing things: to learn from the past, but also to try to build for the future. It means we need to have a broader range of skills because we do different things at different times. We stay agile and light. It’s more diverse, and it’s more interesting.
Designed by humans
Michael Honey
Max Wheeler
Nathan McGinness 
Daniel Edmonds On our bookshelf
Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design
Michael Bierut writes, we read.
XS Green: Big Ideas, Small Buildings
Tiny buildings that make us happy. And the world too.
Design Like You Give a Damn
Low-cost projects from around the world providing shelter, health care, education, and access to clean water, energy, and sanitation. Do more with less.
Phaidon Design Classics
Essential 3-volume compendium of 999 industrially designed objects, in chronological order. Arrived in a box the size of a microwave.
Edward Tufte: Beautiful Evidence
Beautiful Evidence is.
Interesting
Small team, smart people
"I’ve seen it both ways. Working in a teams where the vast majority of the staff were multi-disciplined, and in teams where each section was clearly its own echo chamber to the point where it felt like the considerations of one team would always be ignored by the other. I can tell you that the former was not only infinitely more productive, but that the results were exponentially better."
Inventive Labs
Virginia came to visit recently. Props from one lab to another.
Helvetica
Not the font (that goes without saying!), but the film. We found it ideal for a typographically nerdy DVD night. Bring your own beanbag!
NZ field laboratory?
We wish that were true. But have a look anyway - it's a cool project.
BLDGBLOG
Your brain will effervesce with architectural goodness.
Unit 3/1, The Metropolitan,
1 Gordon St,
Canberra City ACT 2601 Australia
Telephone +61 2 6162 0241
Facsimile +61 2 6162 0242