Pigeon Poetry

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!