icelab: think below the surface

Project: Touch-screens and listening stations

Recently the Icelab crew washed down cucumber sandwiches with Pimms and lemonade at the opening of the Stanley Melbourne Bruce exhibition at the National Archives of Australia. We were invited after having the pleasure of developing and installing four touchscreen interactives and three listening stations.

Project: Published Authors

Looking for a healthy, community-focused way to raise money for a good cause? Published Authors asked us to build them a website that allows users to submit recipes to their own community cookbooks.

The website’s administrative backend is central to Published Authors’ workflow. Cookbooks are exported as XML and used to populate and structure entire cookbooks in our specially constructed InDesign templates. The templates typeset every page, automatically placing title pages and building table of contents and index pages.

Beautifully printed cookbooks are then sold back to the community and Published Authors breathe a sigh of relief knowing that they didn’t have to copy-paste another entire cookbook.

Project: Audio on Demand

The National Museum of Australia asked us to help them re-build their Audio on Demand website, an evolving collection of lectures, forums and symposiums held at the NMA. A custom built back-end has dramatically improved the client’s workflow by organising their RSS and podcasting needs, their MP3 content (including ID3 data) and text transcripts. The new front-end experience includes a inline mp3 player, and much improved navigation and exploratory paths.

There are already over 100 programs and 3 gigabytes available for download or live listening. Go and listen to audio from scholars, story-tellers and curators on almost any subject; archaeology, architecture, history, evolution, exploration, migration, politics, war, sport and more.

Project: Crafting a design

Migratory Practices is the first issue of Craft Australia’s new journal Craft and Design Enquiry. We developed a logo and other printed promotional materials for the journal’s launch. The identity references range of media and processes that Craft Australia and CDE covers: the handmade, physical materials, as well as more formal design processes.

Project: Making a complaint in style

We’ve made making a complaint even easier with a new design and super-clean HTML/CSS templates for the Commonwealth Ombudsman and Postal Industry Ombudsman websites.

Shipping Containers + Sketchup = fun

Michael’s unbuilt (as yet…) sketch for a city of shipping containers replacing cars on a flyover in Cairo. Unfavourably comparable to Andrew Maynard’s Corb 2.0.

New site for Indigenous Community Volunteers

We’ve been working for a while with ICV, and it was great to be able to provide them with a new website. Clean design and sharp Symphony code from Nathan McGinness.

They’re good people, and there are lots of interesting volunteer projects available: have a look and see if anything catches your eye.

HOWZAT! Cricket interactive hits the net

Not content with having a Cricket touchscreen in the Australian Journeys gallery at the National Museum of Australia, we’ve downsampled, re-encoded and repurposed it for in those of you who prefer the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Clear your cache, install Flash and get into it.

Project: Eco Logical Australia

Eco Logical Australia, an Australia-wide environmental consultancy, asked us to redevelop their website in late 2008. With only a month to complete the project we put together a design that is clean and friendly; simple without succumbing to commonplace corporate styles. A tailored installation of the Symphony content management system allows their staff to manage all aspects of the site.

Notable features include: adaptive templates that transform the layout structure as the content grows and changes; and customised print layouts for all sections of the site.

Project: What's on Your Mind?

Old Parliament House opens its doors as the Museum of Australian Democracy in May 2009. As part of the opening celebrations, they’re holding a debate on a topic to be chosen by the people. The site is bright (why choose one colour when you can have them all?), there are some nice JavaScript interface touches to the voting experience, and a Symphony backend for easy maintenance.

What’s on Your Mind?

Project: Cricketing Journeys

The National Museum of Australia’s new Australian Journeys redevelopment includes iconic objects which illustrate Australia’s connections to the wider world. Our touchscreen interactive contains dozens of images and multimedia from a range of archival sources. Aimed at a broad audience, the interactive is easy and fun for the casual browser, but the breadth of content rewards deep investigation. And it has Dennis Lillee in it.

Go visit, if only to watch the 1979 classic “Come on Aussie Come On” TV commercial.

Project: Old Parliament House redevelopment

After almost a year in the pipeline we put the finishing touches on the new Old Parliament House site last week. The comprehensive redesign and development includes a highly customised content management system that allows OPH staff to administer all aspects of the site, including an events calendar, online exhibition content (both new and old), news and education programs.

Max’s design pays respect to the building’s rich heritage and gives the institution the flexibility to adapt into its upcoming new role, in which multimedia and technology will play a crucial part. The build utilises super clean and accessible xHTML/CSS, some subtle JavaScript and integrates with Old Parliament House’s expanding presence on Flickr.

Daniel Edmonds: synaesthetic polymath

As if working on-and-off with Icelab wasn’t enough, Daniel Edmonds has just released his debut album, Walking with Lions. Brilliant musicianship by Daniel and his band, cover design by Michael Honey. Yay!

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.

[Update: one of the bad things about designing websites is sometimes they get redesigned for the worse by other people. Farewell, Academy, it was good while it lasted…]

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.