Icelab

It’s 2015 already. How did that happen? Let’s look back and find out.

We started the year delivering a new responsive website for the Corner Hotel, so Melbourne live-music fans can get their tickets on the go.

We released a new gallery website for the Nolan Collection at the Canberra Museum and Gallery.

We shipped a long-awaited redesign of the Museum of Australian Democracy’s Menzies 1941 diary website.

Aimee Cowie started in our Canberra office, wrangling projects for the Australian National University, National Museum of Australia, Royal Australian Mint and more. Adding Aimee to the team also dramatically improved our emoji game.

The whole team spent a week in Culburra at Coastlab 2014, our semi-regular offsite get-together, where we thought, talked, cooked, and swam.

Mid-year, we had a bunch of people start:

Jojo Hall left the world of commercial radio and .NET development behind and started slinging JavaScript and Ruby with us.

Chris Buttery came on board, working remotely from his surfing spot in Newcastle.

Nick Binnington started in our Melbourne office, only to take a month off to climb Mt Kilimanjaro.

And Alex Timofeev upped the remote-working stakes further, working from his apartment in Bangkok.

In 2014 we had a lots of new starters, but also some departures, moving on to new places and new projects. Thanks Anthony, Hugh, John, Libby, Melissa, Sam, Sammy and Tim.

Narinda Reeders made a baby and called him Otto, the first of two Icelab offspring named after coffee machines.

We built a number of new data and mapping tools for our Australian Photovoltaic Institute PV Maps site.

We designed Wordflyers for Blake eLearning.

We continued our work with the University of Melbourne, helping them launch a platform for their graduate school websites. See it in action at the Victorian College of the Arts.

We shipped another Menzies-related interactive on iPad for the Menzies at War exhibition.

Tim Riley and his wife Misch welcomed baby Clover May to their family.

We put together a series of embeddable widgets for the National Library’s Trove digital archive.

We rebuilt and relaunched the website for Australia’s most succesful independent publisher, Text Publishing.

We built a set of touchscreen and iPad interactives for the Lachlan Macquarie exhibition at Macquarie Bank in Sydney’s Martin Place.

We finally snagged Jess Allison to work in our Melbourne office. She’s just returned from LA, after fending off all the casting agents.

We launched the MPavilion website for Melbourne’s annual architecture event.

We mused on The Way We Live Next in TEDxMelbourne’s Fracture Gallery at Federation Square.

Andrew Croome rounded off the 2014 babysplosion with the regally-named Leo Trevillian.

And to close out the year, the 2014 edition of the long-running Behind the Lines exhibition of political cartoons.

…and that’s just the stuff we can (a) talk about, and (b) remember. We’re deep into a stack of other projects too which we should see in the first quarter of 2015. Onward!

Aimee, Alex, Andrew, Andy, Chris, Jess, Jojo, Max, Michael, Narinda, Nick, Tim and Toby