We are currently rebuilding the Studio Racket website as part of the merging process of Racket and The Contextual Villains.  Partly due to this, we have started using -  so for the latest updates in between now and the relaunch, we can be found here:

And here is a picture of a Californian Quail, as I find most of the Twitter icons quite ugly.

Paul was invited last year to become part of the international jury of The CSS Awards - and I am pleased to say I will be judging all through 2010 as-well.  If you have not checked out The CSS Awards yet (and you are interested in trends and excellence in webdesign) I really recommend having a look as it is by far the sharpest of all the CSS showcase sites out there.

We have just launched the Radio Australia: Celebrating 70 years website.  Racket was responsible for the information architecture, the design and building the content management system.  Here is a bit more about the project:

“For 70 years Radio Australia has been at the forefront of covering news and current affairs, political and social change and key events in Asia and the Pacific.During this time we’ve built up strong partnerships and provided of English language lessons to generations of listeners.”

View the timeline or the rather snazzy television commercial here.

On Sunday evening we enjoyed the opening of the recently revamped Circa restaurant which we were lucky enough to do the graphic design for……website to come soon.

We had the pleasure of designing this lovely little book about the humble postcard, written by the hugely talented lady Beth Sometimes and published by Melbourne publisher Affirm Press. While the process had its challenges - our whole family had swine flu for the last week of the project when we were pushing to print - we are really happy with how it turned out and can now finally sit down in our comfy chairs and read it properly.

Racket picked up and award at the 2009 Desktop create:awards in the ‘Multimedia Campaign’ category.  The award was for our work on the Creative Spaces campaign.

The Contextual Villains & Studio Racket will be consolidated in the near future to become simply Racket.  If you are interested in joining the Racket mailing list to be notified once the new site is live  - and to receive occasional updates etc… head over to Racket and signup…

Some work in progress from our latest field trip with Engaging Visions. We got to run around in some old kilns out in the middle of the forest and up and over a dam wall.

A few weeks ago Paul ran a workshop at the National Portrait Gallery where he stepped through one of Racket’s collages - explaining the step by step process of composing and building an image such as the one below.  He spoke about digitally altered self portraiture and the implications image manipulation in regards to the perception of self.  See below for the image built for the workshop: