icelab: think below the surface

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.

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.

Project: Beyond Reasonable Drought

Last night the Icelab crew, or at least those of us who are not halfway between Adelaide and Darwin as we speak, dropped by Old Parliament House to see the official opening of Beyond Reasonable Drought, a wonderful photographic exhibition from the Many Australia Photographers Group.

The opening included the launch of the Beyond Reasonable Drought website, which we’ve had the pleasure of working on for the last few weeks. The site integrates with Flickr, making uploading/managing/resizing/geotagging each photograph dead simple.

Be sure and check it out — there are some wonderful photographs from all around Australia — or if you’re feeling more adventurous, you can download the Beyond Reasonable Drought KML, which will give you a tour of the exhibition in Google Earth.

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.

Project: Billy Hughes at War

We’ve been rather busy at the lab of late: much of our time has been spent on a site for the multi-local exhibition from Old Parliament House and the Shrine of Remembrance, Billy Hughes at War. We think it rocks.

A mix of super-clean xHTML and CSS, with a little JavaScript and Flash mixed in for that extra something. Be sure and check out the conscription poster builder, which lets you make and email posters to your friends; you can also vote in the conscription debate—one of the most divisive issues in Australian history.

Independent.com.au gets the Icelab treatment

Independent already had a well-established Ruby on Rails backend: we gave it a whole new face which reinforced the strong brand identity.

Great design/HTML/CSS/JavaScript work from Max on this one with a Rails cameo by Tim Riley. Great support, too, from a client with a smart coding team and understanding management.

Project: Eye Candy Animation

We’ve just put the finishing touches on a new site for Eye Candy Animation, a Canberra-based animation and effects studio. It’s a delicious blend of web-standards and (almost) superfluous visual effects and built on top of WordPress for dead-easy administration.

Be sure and check it out, if only to see some of the great animation the Eye Candy kids have filled the site with.

Work in progress: Map table

Checking out our WIP design for an animated map table. Everything looks good when it’s projected big on the wall.

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: Google Maps integration

Sweet little project for the National Museum of Australia, integrating Google maps into a subsite following an ongoing expedition into the Simpson desert. Some HTML/CSS wrangling allows Google maps goodness while maintaining the museum flavour.

Project: Water Rewards identity

Water Rewards in a market-based scheme for reducing water use. Soon you’ll see this program or ones like it rolled out around the world. We built an identity with appeal to end-users and water providers alike, and created a flash-based presentation to sell Water Rewards to local councils and infrastructure companies.

Project: Academy nightclub website

We’d love this site even if we didn’t build it. But we did, and it was a lot of work for a great result. Pushing Flash to the max, the site features upcoming events, a forum, artist listings and a massive punters gallery integrated via Flickr.

Special thanks to Max for working with Michael on design and code, Justin for backend support, and also to Chris for being a great client.

IP Australia Virtual Tour

Yeah! Flash-based spinning 3D navigation makes for a wild* ride, allowing the user to access XML-derived corporate content, video interviews with staff, and information about the region. Strap yourself in and check it out online from the IP Australia website. Kudos to the client for being up for something that goes beyond the standard corporate fare.

*Now not quite as wild. Management afraid: nav slowed down to 1/6 its previous speed.

Things we do: Interactive Histogram

Properly organised data is cool, and useful too. Here we pull data from a database via XML to generate a visually appealing and pretty useful visualisation. Rollover any item to highlight related elements. The loading animation is gratuitous yet irresistible.

Project: Pink Caravan

Now this was fun. The National Museum of Australia’s collection includes a 1960s Propert holiday caravan: this interactive, aimed at children, introduces the caravan and the beach-holiday culture of the time. It’s friendly, fun, and it includes a monkey, so what’s there not to like? Check it out at the NMA website.

Project: Oscar's Sketchbook

Created for the National Museum of Australia’s Captivating and Curious exhibition, this interactive is available both as a touchscreen kiosk at the Museum and online.

Built in Flash by Michael Honey and designed by Joe McKinley for ZOO, the interactive allows users to explore a sketchbook illustrated by Oscar, an aboriginal stockman working on a property in Queensland in 1898.

Oscar’s Sketchbook received a Highly Commended award in the 2006 Museums Australia Media and Publication Design Awards.

Project: TIE IO Roadshow

Take a 280m² space, surround it with 3.5m walls, put in two giant rear-projected screens and fill it with next-generation comms equipment, including a helicopter simulator, field HQ, ANZAC frigate weapon control systems, ruggedized PDAs, laser binoculars, battlespace visualisation tools and more. Top it off with 3D renders, animated diagrams, live simulations, 11 video sources and a massive sound and lighting rig, and you’ve got quite an experience. First built for the International Data Link Symposium in Darling Harbour, the TIE IO Roadshow has now played in three Australian venues, with more to come.