On Sunday 27th September, members from the Digital Eskimo team represented at the Randwick Ecoliving Fair, as part of our ongoing support for the live local project. The day was a great success, despite the gale force winds that continually threatened to blow the fixtures away!
To read more about the event, please click through to the live local blog here.
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We are pleased to announce we will be collaborating with the NSW Architects Registration Board to design and develop the NSW Architecture Diary.
Digital Eskimo has been commissioned to create the online diary to promote events that focus on Architecture in NSW. Ultimately the project aims to encourage and facilitate discussion and debate about a range of architectural issues in the community.
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We attended a lively and interesting Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA) talk featuring lawyer Chris Finn of Finn Roache last night.
The talk touched on that ugly elephant in the design studio, free/spec pitching in the context of the global recession – loosely defined as the act of doing significant free work (strategy, ideation or actual design) to win a tender or proposal process. It was refreshing to hear outright condemnation of this terrible business practice from the floor, although Chris’ legal “solution” worried me.
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It’s a very exciting day today as the new laws that Digital Eskimo helped usher in take effect. The agency put its support behind the Raise the Bar community campaign, providing branding, design and our campaign engine (and initial funding) to the project.
In just three months we were able to help galvanise public opinion and change laws that had been stagnant for 25 years due to political influence and a lack of vocal community support for change. Our campaign, coupled with strong leadership by Clover Moore changed all that.
It’s no overstatement to say NSW will never be the same again. Small bar legislation takes effect July 1 and recent changes to the entertainment planning laws mean you’ll likely see a real person playing real music in that bar.
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We just hit the go switch on NewMatilda.com, the independent news analysis site with some of the most progressive and interesting writers working in Australia (or anywhere for that matter!). The site is the product of our Considered Design process, and really shows just what can be achieved when you take the time to understand your client’s business and consider users constantly in the design process.
There’s a lot of smarts under the hood but the site somehow feels so simple to use, a sign of great design in my books. A sophisticated tagging system and editorial controls including algorithm based What’s Hot make the site work well for regular users and fresh browsers alike.
I could go on but the proof is in the pudding … www.newmatilda.com
And a recent favourite 
You Only Get One Tampa
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Yesterday the Premier of NSW Morris Iemma announced a radical shakeup of our state’s liquor licensing laws. The changes follow an intense couple of months campaigning which was spearheaded by our very own Raise the Bar campaign. Its a great result for the campaign as pretty much everything we had been calling for appears to have been included, most importantly cheaper, simpler small bar licenses will become law in NSW at last.
The impact this will have on NSW cultural life should not be underestimated; alternative music and art galleries will become economically viable overnight, small experimental venues will open stimulating more conversations, political debate and cultural exchange amongst the diverse audiences they will attract. This isn’t really about drinking, this is about the cultural fabric of society, though the art of drinking will be improved too with more variety such as organic beers and wines being given a chance to flourish in the smaller venues.
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Last night Dave and I presented the freshly-minted Raise The Bar Campaign site at WebJam. The site was well received, resulting in our presso being voted third favourite. Big thanks to WebJam and SitePoint for the prize and for everyone that voted for us!
Congrats also to the other winners, especially Dmitry for the Optimus Microformats Transformer. The project is a great contribution to the standards community – and he was sooooo pumped about winning the prize (which included an iPod Touch contributed by Binalogue)… it was a delight to see.
WebJam will be posting videos from the night to Viddler shortly. But in the meantime, Priscilla, who attended the event on her birthday – happy birthday P – has posted a note about the campaign (and why she’s supporting it) on her blog.
The media interest in the campaign, plus getting the site up and live and ironing out the bugs have prevented us from writing about the site here. Hopefully Dave will have a few moments in the coming days to write a bit more about the campaign and the site…
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Politics Online have announced nominees for the “The Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics“. We’re very excited to see the ACTU, one of our clients, appearing in the list for the Your Rights at Work website. We designed and built the site (with our good friends and tech team Mooball) a few years ago as a hub to the ACTU’s very successful campaign and continue to provide strategy, creative and technical support for it.
If you get a moment, check out the nominees and cast your vote (for us!)
P.S. congrats also to our friends over at GetUp!, who have also been nominated.
This is an international award often presented to projects with much bigger audiences and budgets, so it’s great to see Australian representation among the nominees. And although we’ve already won an Effectiveness award from the Australian Graphic Design Association for the site it’s still exciting to be up for another!
**UPDATE: We won! We’re very excited to hear that the campaign site was awarded first place. Watch a video of the award ceremony
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Our latest project has just launched for the Garvan Institute of Medical Research. The site features a powerful cross linking sub system for related information and promo modules, donation promotion capacity and a comprehensive, well considered information architecture providing an easy to navigate structure for the significant amount of content the institute must provide its various stakeholders.
Importantly there’s inspirational imagery throughout and a range of features that ensure the communications goals of the organisation are squarely met by this first phase of the project. Exciting new features were devised in our brainstorms with the Garvan and will be implemented in the next Phase .. meanwhile take a look and donate to help the institute in its vital work.
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Recently we produced some banners for WWF International in support of their Climate Witness initiative.
WWF’s aim was to make an impact on delegates as they entered a G8 symposium on climate change, and for future events the Climate Witness team may attend. They came to us to help work out an effective communications tool to achieve their goals.
We developed a series of 2 metre high banners (pictured above posing with the d.eskimo team) that each tell an individual climate witness story through a number of means:
Visit the WWF International Climate Witness page for more information about the initiative.
We did consider a number of different approaches to the banners in terms of their environmental footprint, but unfortunately there were none that we could find that were particularly friendly. We did choose durable and long-lasting materials in the hope that the banners will see a lot of use before reaching their used-by date. But if anyone knows of any enviro-friendly options for banners and the like, please let us know!