Icelab

We’ve been back in the lab for a week now, and inspired by our personal retrospectives for 2011 (Andy’s, Max’s, Michael’s and Tim’s), let’s take a look back at what we got up to at Icelab.

First, some big changes for the lab itself:

• Hugh and Andy joined the team.
• Max & Tim became directors and equal co-owners along with Michael.
• We went multi-national, with presences now in Canberra, Melbourne, and Bacolod (at the time of writing, Hugh’s also doing some work from Tokyo!).

We shipped some stuff we’re really proud of:

• A rebuilt site for the Museum of Australian Democracy.
• Also for MoAD, dedicated sites for Mildenhall’s Canberra, a wonderful gallery of early black and white photos of the city, and Behind the Lines, an exhibition of political cartoons.
• Two touchscreen interactives for the National Museum of Australia: Flemington on Cup Day & Exploring the world at Port Macquarie. For these, we eschewed the old world of Flash and built them entirely in HTML5.
• A cute little interactive e-card for Harmony Day.
• A website and major new Rails application to handle online ticket sales and box office management for the Corner Hotel.
• TumblrThemr, a tool for making Tumblr theme development a little less head-desky.
• And after a whirlwind 6 weeks of iOS development, Decaf Sucks for iPhone!

We wrote in Objective-C, Ruby, JavaScript (increasingly via CoffeeScript), PHP, Processing, English and bash. Of course, plenty of HTML & CSS. We used Rails, Sinatra, WordPress, jQuery, Backbone, and numerous static-site generators. We built for desktops, touchscreens, iPhones and iPads, as well as the many email clients of the world. We loved pushing to Heroku, but still built our fair share of servers. It wasn’t all work for screens either: we made business cards featuring generative artwork, organised video shoots, and helped businesses with their web and mobile strategies.

Beyond our usual design and development work, some other cool stuff happened:

• News.com.au visited us to hear about our 4-day-work-week and other things.
• Max wrote a book! Let him teach you to design websites and apps for smart devices.
• Max also spoke at Swipe Conference about the current state of mobile web design.
• Michael & Tim spoke at Web Directions South about the spectrum of web-to-native options for building smartphone apps.
• Also at Web Directions, Icelab was a finalist for the McFarlane Prize for Flemington on Cup Day.
• Dispatch, our coffee subscription service, turned one year old and shipped enough coffee to make over 10,000 cups.

And some little extras to round things out:

• We drank a fair bit of coffee ourselves (is it any surprise?). On Decaf Sucks, we contributed 186 new reviews.
• We wrote a lot more here on this site: 28 posts in 2011 versus just 10 in 2010.
• We hosted a bunch of jellies and ruby meetups in our Canberra office.
• We attended Rails Camp at Lake Ainsworth and got started building Icebox, which you’ll hear more about later.
• More than half the lab turned paleo.

Big year! What’s more, our calendar for the start of 2012 is already filling up. Do you want us to build something great for you? Or are you interested in working with us? Let’s talk.