It’s time for something new

After 14 years we’re hanging up our keyboards. Our team is joining the lovely people at Culture Amp, where we’ll be helping build a better world of work.

Icelab

The Wheeler Centre

The Wheeler Centre is Melbourne’s home for smart, passionate and entertaining public talks on every topic. They hold more than 230 events each year, featuring local and international speakers. The centre is a non-profit arts organisation, and has budgets and resources that align with that reality. Nonetheless they have large aspirations for the way they disseminate content about and from their range of events and other commissioned writing projects.

Client:The Wheeler CentreVisit the website

Landing

A cross section from the Wheeler Centre home page
Section of the home page

Icelab was brought on design and build a new platform to help them realise those aspirations. This process began with a series of workshops with staff and stakeholders from the Wheeler Centre to try and discover what they wanted to achieve, to understand resourcing issues that might impede those aims, workflow issues with their existing platform, and to tease out latent ideas from their teams.

Events calendar

Section of the events page

Build a platform able to push large swathes of content live in a single push to coincide with event program launches, and that can easily handle the visitation spikes that coincide with those launches.

We recommended and facilitated moving of their enormous library of video content from an expensive hosted service into YouTube, relieving the Wheeler Centre of the financial burden and complexity of running their own media servers, while simultaneously making their content more accessible to a larger audience.

During that process we automated the media publishing pipeline for their site: automatically converting, resizing, and reshaping images, audio, and video content for different devices, contexts and platforms, dramatically reducing the workload on the administrative staff.

Video content

The vast archive of video content was migrated to YouTube and wrapped in a beautiful custom video player.
Screenshot of video player

Audio player

A beautiful embeddable audio player for the Wheeler Centre’s thousands of hours of recorded content.
Screenshot of audio player

We constructed a content management system that empowered the two-person team the Wheeler Centre to publish rich and varied pieces of content —including with complex relational data— with ease.

Notes

Section of the home page

The Wheeler Centre had a particularly hands-on role throughout the project, as we consulted them for incremental feedback on all iterations of the prototypes, design, and development work. Their new site has allowed the Wheeler Centre to reach a wider audience with the content, and to maximise their internal resources to publish rich, deep content more often – including Andrew Denton’s ‘Better Off Dead’, which is currently the #1 ranked podcast in Australia.