NSF Consulting’s new site is based on a WordPress blog. Graphic Design by Frenchcurve.

Does this site look like a blog? This site hasn’t gone live just yet, but will soon be viewable at irispictures.com.au.

Ether has been working with our fav graphic designer, Frenchc u r v e, making brochure like websites, using blogging software.

The challenge is to make the site look like website rather than blog. Apart from tweaking the graphic designs, we remove most options for users to comment.

The Rymer Childs’ site is the first to go live, with a couple more currently in production.

This week is the Web Directions South conference at Darling Harbour where we get to catch up on the latest and greatest advances in web trends. Expect the results to show on your sites soon!

We’ve recently started working with a fabulous new client – The Red Room Company. The Red Room’s brief is to ‘create, promote and publish a spectrum of poetry by Australian writers, in unusual ways’, and so far we’ve been deeply impressed by their approach.

They have a knack for coming up with simple, brave and eccentric ideas for promoting poetry – the sort of ideas that, if executed badly, would probably just seem a bit mad. But fortunately they know how to follow through with a whimsical idea and turn it into something real and magical. They’ve got enough passion, professionalism and attention to detail to be able pull off a left-field concept. (Yes, I’m gushing, but it’s one of those oh-so-rare cases of Client Love.)

Pigeon Poetry is a project where the Red Room team commissioned 8 poets to write poems that would be attached to the legs of 8 thoroughbred pigeons and raced from Stanwell Tops to Mt Ousley.

(See more photos in the Flickr Pigeon Poetry group.)

Red Room hired us to build the pigeonpoetry.com site, which was a fun little project. We built it in Django, and had a great time working with Creative Director Johanna Featherstone to find an intersection between poetry and our usual data-driven approach to web design. In the end we ended up riffing on the poetry inherent in the data – filling up a MySQL instance with a megabyte or so of whimsy and pumping it out onto the web through the gorgeous page layouts of the Red Room’s designer Sandra Krumins.

And then we got caught up in the world of the pigeon fanciers – trips to pigeon lofts, sipping cups of tea and eating scones with the pigeon trainers, learning how the races are organised, learning the lingo…

It’s always inspiring to get a window into an erstwhile closed room. The pigeon fancying room was full of:

• interesting characters who were generous with their time and knowledge (particular thanks to Steve Saywell, Alan Kerr, and Graham and June Davidson)
• bizarre facts (we learnt more about pigeon behaviour and physiology than we ever knew there was to learn)
• the natural beauty of these gutsy creatures
• friendly competitiveness
• beautiful South Coast scenery

We look forward to the next Red Room project!

Can a multimedia production company turn their own corporate site into a blog? Would this look a little low-tech for our very corporate clients. Our decision wasn’t all about convenience, we are happy to make this gesture/statement of our belief in web 2.0 and beyond.

Making our content fit a blog structure, while ensuring we didn’t create a huge amount of work for ourselves, meant we have drastically trimmed our portfolio to include only the projects that still look pretty much the way they did when we built them.

To avoid losing our history we’ve summarised older projects and achievements on the About page, and retained the old Ether website at old.ether.com.au