Inventive Labs: Portfolio

TheatreSpace website

2009-10-22T18:58:25+11:00

TheatreSpace is a research project that aims to find out why young people choose to go, or not go, to live theatre. It's been funded by major theatre companies and creative educational organisations across the country.

The TheatreSpace team wanted a website with a fresh and contemporary design that appealed to the young adults that TheatreSpace is all about, but was also professional and friendly to the theatre companies and academics who use the website. We used Blueprint to build them an eye-catching website that showcases the project's outcomes, partners, news and symposium. How could we not love a client who comes to us saying they want to use helvetica bold on yellow...

Lilith: A Feminist History Journal

2009-10-21T11:33:41+11:00

The Lilith Feminist History Journal publishes articles and reviews on women, gender, sexuality and related issues - it's a valuable forum for new and established scholars of feminist history.

Lilith has been producing print journals in Melbourne since 1984, but they realised that publishing online would allow them to reach a broader audience and bring down their production costs. We built Lilith a beautiful new website that allows them to publish their annual editions online. It gives them the ability to add articles and reviews using Blueprint's 'Edition' feature with little more than a few clicks of the mouse.

Serabeena website

2009-10-21T10:10:28+11:00

Serabeena is a second-generation, family-owned business specialising in arts and crafts, craft supplies, creative and educational toys. They've got an amazing new range of inventive, inspiring, and fun products.

We built Serabeena a new website that showcased their bright, colourful toys and craft products; something that appeals to Australian kids and parents, with a bit of a nod to the Japanese retail aesthetic. It uses Blueprint's shopping facility to make it all-too-easy to buy those colourful finger puppets by the truckload.

Environmental Toolbox Training

2009-07-14T17:45:16+10:00

The Environmental Toolbox Training website provides information about the training programs offered by environmental trainer Neil Jaycock. This is a great example of a site that can be up and running quickly and easily using the Blueprint CMS. This site uses the project, personnel and contact blueprint modules.

Third Drawer Down website

2009-06-19T13:03:15+10:00

Third Drawer Down is both a product design agency – responsible, among other things, for a terrific range of high-quality, limited-edition tea-towels designed by artists – and a shop selling a variety of weird and wonderful objects.

We designed and built Third Drawer Down a website which includes an online shopping facility, a blog and a gallery of agency clients, and they use Blueprint to maintain the site in-house themselves.

'Breath' mini-site

2009-06-19T12:49:25+10:00

We produced this mini-site to promote Tim Winton's novel Breath on behalf of his literary agent, Jenny Darling & Associates. Breath has been released in hardback and paperback in a number of territories, and the website provides a catalogue of covers and links to publishers around the world.

In June 2009, the book was awarded the prestigious Miles Franklin Award for Literature – a record fourth Miles Franklin award for Winton, who is one of Australia's most beloved writers.

Back to Back Theatre website

2008-08-22T17:31:43+10:00

Back to Back Theatre is a contemporary theatre company based in Geelong, with an ensemble cast made up of actors with a range of disabilities. They have performed - and been lauded - the world over.

Back to Back Theatre's website is responsible for promoting upcoming work, but must also present a great deal of archival material in a format that's easy to browse and fascinating to explore more deeply. We had a great time working with them to produce a website that's bold and dynamic, and content-rich.

Plans at Work software and website

2008-08-22T17:17:15+10:00

Plans at Work is Ian Clark's methodology for helping businesses realise their strategic goals. We worked with Ian to develop a web application that allows participants in the Plans at Work program to track their progress towards organisational milestones, while allowing staff and management to keep track of their day-to-day activities. The software prepares comprehensive reports showing forward movement and indicating problem areas, which give the board a bird's-eye view of operations.

To promote Ian's work, we also designed a website showcasing the ideas of Plans at Work, and demonstrating key functions of the software with a screencast.

McCulloch & McCulloch website

2008-08-22T16:58:46+10:00

If you've wandered around our portfolio even briefly, you'll know that the Labs has a bit of a thing for books. McCulloch & McCulloch is responsible for just about the biggest, heaviest book of all: McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art. It's a whopper. First published in 1968, based on a scrapbook of cuttings by Alan McCulloch (an Australian art critic), the book has had several editions and is now kept current by Alan's daughter Susan and his granddaughter Emily.

McCulloch & McCulloch now publishes a number of other art-related books, and this year will for the first time publish a beautiful art diary based on material from the Encyclopedia.

The website uses Blueprint's new shopping cart functionality, based on some of the successful work we did for Readings.

Text Publishing website

2008-08-22T16:34:17+10:00

Text Publishing is one of Australia's most successful independent publishing companies. They publish, among others, the work of Tim Flannery, Helen Garner, M.J Hyland, Kate Grenville, J.M Coetzee and friend of the Labs Shane Maloney, and last year published two books that made the prestigious Man Booker Prize shortlist.

We've built Text a clean and elegant new website (which makes a particular point of showcasing their famously good cover designs), with Blueprint running the show behind the scenes.

Readings

2007-12-19T17:15:55+11:00

Readings is one of Melbourne's most beloved and trusted brands, and a highly-regarded independent retailer of books, music and film since 1969. The business has grown from a single Carlton shopfront to five stores across the city, and when we were approached to take control of Readings' web presence, we treated the assignment as if we were opening a sixth shop.

The key technical challenge was integrating with Readings' existing point-of-sale software and inventory management system. We think our solution is both lateral and efficient, giving maximum flexibility with the minimum of friction between the two systems.

Our design was driven by Readings' strong and enduring brand identity, which translated well into a clear and user-friendly site layout. As in the real-world stores, the product covers do most of the heavy lifting, while the rest of the design is somewhat restrained. A lovely set of icons by Cat MacInnes emphasises key elements.

Very special attention was paid to the shopping cart and checkout process, and we're quietly proud of the results we've achieved. Give it shot - buy yourself a book (or two, and get free freight).

New Worlds, New Sovereignties Conference

2007-06-28T10:38:23+10:00

Academics from Melbourne University and Victoria University are combining with the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service to present a conference on sovereignty in December this year. They needed a simple website through which participants and panellists could submit proposals and applications, as well as a place they could find information about accommodation, the conference venue and the program.

The site uses some of Blueprint's core features in addition to a custom blueprint development that takes registrations, stores them in a database table, and allows conference organisers to export CSV files of that data for further manipulation (mail merges and the like).

Resicon

2007-06-18T10:36:46+10:00

The striking new identity developed by Design by Committee for this family-run Master Builders business needed a website to match.

Another Blueprint site — this one demonstrates the flexibility of the contact form, which can aggregate user-entered data from any number and type of fields. And the custom module created for their Projects portfolio shows just how well Blueprint enables image-rich websites.

Shane Maloney

2007-06-18T10:29:51+10:00

A new Murray Whelan novel is a Melbourne publishing event. Shane Maloney's crime-solving maverick explores the seedy underbelly of Australia's cultural capital and usually gets caught up in its political machinations — as well as a murder or two.

For the launch of the sixth Whelan book, Sucked In, Maloney wanted to move his site to a Content Management System so that he could communicate more effectively (and regularly) with his readership.

We gave him Blueprint, developing a custom module to record the details of each of his books, with quotes from literary reviews and details of foreign editions. Audio readings from his books and video excerpts from their film translations are accessible alongside the books. The events page automatically updates to display his forthcoming appearances as he crosses the country promoting his new book. And loyal readers subscribe to the intermittent broadcasts from his shed-based think-tank, The Brunswick Institute.

All this is presented within a striking and recognisably Whelan-esque design.

Register of Urban Design Practices

2007-06-18T10:01:26+10:00

The Register is an initiative of the Urban Design Forum, a network of enthusiastic and creative people committed to making a significant contribution to improving the functioning and quality of Australia's cities and towns.

It is now the authoritative directory of Australian businesses engaged in urban design, community planning, environmental design and all related fields.

The Register is a custom application we've developed in Rails with a number of neat features exposed through an intuitive interface. Practices can list their business details (including a logo), and contact details for each of their Australian offices. Furthermore, they can develop a complete portfolio on the site, uploading images and descriptions of recently completed projects. The Register is browsable by state and business category, and features a pretty smart little search engine.

RMIT SRO Database

2007-06-18T09:54:54+10:00

Upgrading from a paper-and-spreadsheet system of data collection, the RMIT Student Union wanted a proper database for their Student Rights Officers (SRO) casework. The database had to be equally accessible to PC and Mac users—making a web application the sensible choice—and flexible enough to let the officers collect student and case details in a discreet manner during student interviews.

Here at the Labs, we worked closely with the Student Union to determine the data fields to be collected and the most usable form in which they could be presented. We worked hard to ensure data integrity in a database that needed more flexibility than is normally offered by process-driven constraints—that is, the database doesn't set the rules of casework, the people do.

Advanced search queries are performed by users with varying levels of access to restricted data, and results are presented in a variety of formats. We built a uniquely powerful search tool, the Rules-based Search Engine, which inspects and understand the relationships between the various entities in the database (Students, Cases, Interviews, etc), as well as the relatively sensitivity of data fields within these entities. Using this tool, officers could build and bookmark search queries much like you construct rules and filters in your email client.

Australians All

2007-06-17T11:12:27+10:00

In "Why AustraliansAll.com.au, and why right now", former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser wrote: "The group that has signed on to the charter of Australians All believes we need to make an effort in our own country to counter views and policies that seem to us alien and unacceptable. We are determined to promote an open, tolerant multicultural society and to oppose racism, bigotry and discrimination of all kinds."

The Australians All website is the primary vehicle for some forty prominent social leaders to advance the Australian public debate on all these matters.

We're proud that we were invited to help.

Scribe Website and Business System

2007-06-17T10:50:44+10:00

Under the direction of Henry Rosenbloom, Scribe Publications has grown to be one of the most important independent publishing houses in Australia, and was awarded "Australian Small Publisher of the Year" in 2006.

Initially Inventive Labs was brought in to develop a website featuring their entire catalogue, plus news posts, a newsletter and Henry's weblog. But as we worked with them in preparing their data for the web, it became apparent that their internal database was failing to meet their needs. We suggested and then built a custom database to precisely fit their internal workflows — a database that almost incidentally publishes a clean, elegant and content-rich website as a by-product of their quotidian activities.

Cyclopharm

2007-06-17T10:03:34+10:00

This Australian multinational is taking the significant new field of nuclear medicine to the world. In preparation for its successful public listing, we helped Cyclopharm identify their website and customer relationship requirements.

Then we built them a powerful CMS that is internationalised to the core — not only can Cyclopharm easily provide translations of its site content for many world markets, but regional representatives updating the site work within a fully localised user interface. Side-by-side with the CMS is a bespoke CRM solution, helping Cyclopharm stay in touch with customers and investors.

IAIA Reference Finder

2007-06-13T16:51:56+10:00

Educators at the Institute of American Indian Arts needed a bibliographic tool to review, categorise and collect a large number of academic texts for their students. The IAIA Reference Finder we developed at the Labs enables this within a highly usable and aesthetically appropriate interface.

Via the web interface, lecturers can produce lists of books, articles and web resources. Each item is recorded with full reference information, a cover image, a review, and a relevance/quality rating. The lists are collations of these items with introductory matter, and are the principle way of navigating through the references. But students can also browse a complete index, perform advanced searches, or jump through references by tags.

The system, built in three weeks, has been a great success. Additional features are now in the works.