The 2008 Perth International Arts Festival is well underway, and we’re really pleased to be involved once more.

Art direction for the 2008 site was provided once again by Block Branding, to fit in with the overall Festival theme. PerthWeb provided hosting and additional support, preparing images and video and creating the MySpace page for Beck’s Music Box, the great new music venue on the Esplanade.

Clever Starfish turned Block’s designs into a functioning web site, and integrated changes to the custom content management system to allow Perth Festival staff to maintain the events on the site. A significant change this year was the increased focus on the My Festival Planner, the online tool to allow people to plan their Festival events. Patrons can now upload a photo to their My Festival profile, and the home page features event lists from selected profiles.

Our feature event this year is diva Cesaria Evora, who sings soulful, bluesy Creole-Portuguese folk tunes to Afro-Cuban rhythms - a real melting pot of amazing sounds and textures. More information about Cesaria’s two performances can be found on the site: Cesaria Evora - Perth International Arts Festival 2008.

Other events that you’ll find Starfish staff at include Black Watch, about the legendary Scottish Black Watch Regiment, The Turning, based on the Tim Winton novel of the same name (and a collaboration with Perth Theatre Company, who we also provide web site services to), and New York rockers Sonic Youth.

The Festival program, under new Artistic Director Shelagh Magadza, includes an amazing array of theatre, dance, music, film, visual arts and free events, so there’s definitely something for everyone.

2007 has been a big year for Clever Starfish - it’s hard to believe that we’re at our second Christmas already.

The past few months have been particularly busy, with a whole stack of projects that have recently launched, and some very exciting ones launching soon. To help us with the workload, we welcome a new Starfish in the form of Al Stoiche, who joins us in a development role and brings our team count to four.

Some recent projects include:

Perth International Arts Festival 2008
We’re very proud to be involved with the Perth Festival, Australia’s largest and oldest multi-arts festival, again for 2008. Again, the amazing creative direction was provided by Block Branding, with media management and hosting provided by PerthWeb. Stay tuned for more information about our special event, amazing diva Cesaria Evora.

Richard Smyth Wild Earth Photography
Well-known around the state and indeed around Australia for his breath-taking landscape, panoramic and wildlife photographs, Richard Smyth is pleased to offer prints, both frames and unframed, for online sale to Australia and internationally. For this project, we worked with local agency Bold Branding.

Brenda Hynes Acting - To Be or Not To Be - audio book on CD
We had a blast putting this site together - Brenda is an amazing woman who has many a tale to tell about life in Hollywood! To Be or Not To Be is not only her story, it’s a great source of information for anyone who thinks they might like to be an actor. Brenda tells it like it is, the good and the bad, and it’s a fascinating listen.

Jay Heifetz Photography - Commercial and Corporate Photography
Traveling around the world taking pictures is Jay’s passion, and his enthusiasm comes through in every picture. The focus of this web site was ensuring that the photos were displayed at the highest quality possible without compromising on user experience.

Perth Theatre Company
This web site refresh was scheduled to coincide with the launch of the 2008 Season - Objects of Desire. We love working with arts organisations and look forward to working with PTC in the future to expand their online presence even further - a new content management and email newsletter management system will be rolled out next.

That’s only some of the projects we’ve been working on - stay tuned for more great launches in the new year. For now, we’d like to wish a very safe and happy holiday season to all of our past, present and future clients and our colleagues in the web industry. We’re looking forward to a big 2008 and we hope you are too!

We were thrilled to see this article, about our WA Web Awards win, printed in the current issue of our local paper, the Wanneroo Times:

(click on the photo for a larger version)