Abruerton

BeST from Wellington

The BeST Design Awards 2007 were several weeks ago but with the quality on show that night I’d be rude not to mention it. I was fortunate to be attending it so was able to see a wide range of nz design really at an international standard!

Of the Interactive Media and Website Design awards Fracture (Auckland based) and Resn (Wellington based) both received Gold.

Fracture was awarded for its website for Obo, a hockey protection/ safety equipment company which specialises in goalie gear.

Resn was awarded for its website for Synapse Learning’s educational software “The Bridge“. The starting point for The Bridge is a story, which is read by both the teacher and the pupils. It is a story of a family journey and the unexpected events that happen along the way.

The rest of the nominees were also of an impressive quality with a wide range of design companies being awarded, check out the winners on the BeST Awards site.

Of particular note Resn impressed me by also managing to have two of it’s other client projects awarded Bronze too. Firstly was The Black Seeds site and last but not least the Minuit site.

The Minuit site in particular grabbed my attention, starting with an avatar character you navigate the site by walking around the inside of a giant circle (kind of like a giant mouse wheel). It still allows you to easily jump around the different sections but the joy really comes from wandering around the “mini minuit world” and discovering the different landscape additions and features in each section. Certainly refreshing to see a unique approach to simple navigation.

All in all it had been a heavily design enriching weekend in Auckland which I loved but Wellington certainly showed you don’t need a million plus and traffic nightmares to do innovative and quality design!

*On a personal note and shameless shout-out my final year Major project from Massey University was awarded silver in the Student Interactive Media and Website Design section so that was pretty sweet too!