Creativity Base

I’ve been a fan of custom culture for the best part of my life- since churning out personal designs on my 9-pin dot matrix printer back in the ‘eighties. Lucky for us (the makers and the consumers) the days of home-made Print Shop calendars and greeting cards are mostly behind us now, and an exciting and (relatively) new trend is taking hold. I’m talking about custom merchandise, made to order from uploaded designs, delivered direct to customers through the wonder of the internet. A few years ago, a friend tipped me off to the existence of one such site called Cafepress, and then in 2007 I discovered its more evolved counterpart, Zazzle. A string of mugs, shirts, shoes and miscellaneous purchases (and sales) later, Emma Sterling and I have finally made some of our internationally crafted photographic works available as a premium quality Redbubble calendar.

The calendar features images taken by Emma Sterling and myself, over our last few years of artistic globe-trotting. The USA, Canada, Mexico, Singapore and Australia are all featured, with subjects including landscapes, scenics, architecture and the occasional detail. I hope you enjoy the images as they flick past in the RedBubble slide show below- and please check out the link above if you’d like to take a closer look at our very first deluxe photo calendar. As fondly as I recall those days of brashly printing out black and white greeting cards on sprocketed computer paper, these are pretty amazing times we’re living in. Surely there’s never been a better time to be an in independent artist, with tools like these at our disposal?

Oh, and if you make a purchase, be sure to take a photo of your item once it’s on the wall, and we’ll happily post it in our flickr gallery. We’ll also mail you a little surprise follow-up gift… it is nearly Christmas after all!

Dan Monceaux

Back in June, Emma Sterling and I moved our digital media business, danimations, into an exciting new premises. Located at Level 1, 193 Wakefield Street in Adelaide’s downtown CBD is the Tomorrow Studio, a South Australian state Government initiative to bring complementary start-up companies from the digital media sector together, to foster a culture of collaboration and rapid growth. We are very proud and fortunate to be a part of it.

Offering the added benefits of heavily subsidised rent, terrific shared facilities and a tenancy contract that can be exited with minimum fuss, we applied back in the first quarter of 2009, and moved in with the first wave of tenants in June. The culture of collaboration is strong already, and under our roof we have a spread of businesses offering services including web, graphic design, animation, 3d graphics, multimedia, network services, video (that’s us), simulations, game development and electronic publishing. No two businesses are in direct competition, and we’re able to keep our own hours with 24 hour access to the building. Many of the tenants (us included) have lock-up offices, while the remainder work in the building’s open-plan central space.

Emma Sterling edits in the danimations office

We’ve had a great run with the Department of Trade & Economic Development this year, and the Tomorrow Studio move follows our receipt of a Tomorrow Start grant which has help us upgrade our computers and aquire new technology and software- thrusting us over some major hurdles stunting our business’ growth. With the official champagne launch rolling by the other week, we finally feel like we’re ready to rhumba in the new space.

The Department of Trade has recently announced a second round of grants available to start-up businesses in the digital media sector, and there are currently some vacancies for new tenants in the Tomorrow Studio following the announcement that Holopoint (a leading games and simulation developer) has outgrown the space and is moving to another more suitable location.

For more information on the Tomorrow Start grants and the Tomorrow Studio, visit http://www.creativesa.org/

Dan Monceaux