Em Space Design

Em Space Web Design

Palette - the designer's toolbox

Our latest product is designed by designers, for designers.
Designers need to know what tools they have at hand, but don't usually have the time to be across everything Drupal.
Palette gives a designer his or her favourite Drupal modules and keeps them updated and ready for install at any time, for any site.
More flexible and more current than an install profile, Palette aims to give the designers all the Drupal tools they need - from the quote, to going live.
Check it out here

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Fancy a dress?

Mentone Fancy Dress is one of our original clients, and one of our first success stories...
Sherrin Bracci ran a wonderful enterprise in beachside Mentone, renting clean and colourful costumes to the locals.
Her first website with us went off like the clappers, and within weeks, she was getting enquiries from suburbs 20 minutes drive away.
The clean, easily navigable design appealed to customers as much as the custom CMS tools (painfully handcrafted by Simon Hobbs - thank goodness for Drupal!) appealed to Sherrin and her staff.
Such a terrifyingly busy site cried out for eCommerce, and this year, Sherrin took the jump.
We maintained the distinctive charms of the old design but added eCommerce and a lot of other yummy Drupal features, and we are all thrilled.
(Yours truly is particularly excited about buying her crazy wigs and false eyelashes online!)
Take a look! And dare you not to buy something... :)

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CCI goes live

This is very cool... a playground conversation between Swinburne University academic and bass-playing Mum Amanda Lawrence, and Lonely Planet's project management guru Nick Thorpe led to Em Space scoring this very interesting project.

Thorpe was evangelising Drupal and Em Space's Simon Hobbs to Lawrence who was in the process of considering who was to develop the new Creative Centre for Innovation website.

It was a tricky brief - the site groans with content from academics all around the country and internationally, and each article had to be tagged with all the authors, the content types, the universities, and so on. Very very complex.

Lawrence had done a fantastic job in reducing the complexity down to detailed wireframes. Simon reduced it further in a stroke of genius using Drupal's organic groups.

The result is accessible, searchable, interesting.

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The 'Bots are here!

Break out the Lulla-bubbly, the 'Bots have finally arrived. The rockstars of Drupal have hit Australian shores to conduct five days of funk'd-out Drupal training - three days of theming and jQuery (just completed by yours truly!) and two days of API and module dev.

And let me say, it was everything I was hoping for and more. These guys are sooooo cool and soooooo good, they could even get a design hack like me to pumping out php.

There's more info on the Lullabot site including a photo of da-lovely Da-n hoeing into some top class nosh at the conference centre. Nick, Dan and Josh will covering some of the more trickily-dickily aspects of developing Drupal over the final two days.

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Go on - Go Live!

We are super-pumped to announce our new Go Live package that will get start-up businesses on the web in only three days. A walk-in service, we developed this idea to launch our beautiful new Edithvale studio.

With Go Live, you get a home, about us and a contact form as well as two other pages of your choice in your corporate colours, with your logo. We'll also train you up so you can make the site your own. Sweet!

We're so excited about it, we're offering local businesses 500 double-sided business cards on the 100% recycled luxury stock Envirocare as a studio-warming present til the end of April.

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Drupal and Em Space featured in Desktop mag

The excellent Australian design mag Desktop graced Drupal with a two page spread entitled Meet my new pal: Drupal (April 08 edition).
Matthew Magain makes the case for Drupal from a designer point of view, in a refreshing style without jargon. You can read the full text here.

Magain thrilled us here at Em Space with a glowing review of our Simon's presentation:
"A highlight of the day was the Lonely Planet case study presented by Simon Hobbs... Regular readers of this column will be aware of my blatant bias towards accessible, semantic html over Flash or table-based layouts, so it should come as no surprise then that this presentation to stood out as Hobbs described the process that his team followed when implementing a stunning visual design using best-practice techniques (clean, semantic mark-up styled with CSS). The presentation was also a good example of how Drupal can be used to implement a design that was conceived without any knowledge of the technology to be used to implement it - the way it should be."
Sime was pretty pleased with himself after all that, ha!...
You know, it's great to get a bit of dead-tree credibility and it was lovely to see one of our photos in print. From our experience, most Melbourne designers read Desktop from front to back, so this is fantastic for growing Drupal in Australia.
Magain wrote the article after accepting our invite to our Melbourne MiniCon in February this year.
Needless to say, we think he's ace.

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Publicity Works and the Melbourne Workers Theatre

If you're life was a show, would anyone buy a ticket?
Yes, but only if it looked as lovely as the new Melbourne Workers Theatre website...
Designed by the extraordinary talents at Publicity Works, Em Space took this delicious design and created an offset dynamic flash menu with some flash animation and powered the whole thing up with Drupal.
This is the first of many upcoming collaborative projects that we'll be rolling out with Publicity Works over the coming months.
Dontcha love it? We do!

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HMR Website Now Live

An exciting new business venture, HMR Healthcare is a new supplier to the aged care industry. Started recently by Jennifer and Campbell Hannan (who also co-founded the chewing gum cleaning specialists businessCOYB) who recognised that as more baby boomers collect their pensioner cheques, there will be an increasing need (and desire) from this generation for funky frames and cool comodes.
Jennifer and Campbell have some exciting, sexy new products from Europe and the States which emphasise form as well as function. The Australian market has never seen anything like them, so Jen
and Campbell intend to position themselves as the supplier to high end chains and retailers for these new brands of aged-care and disability products.
This new website will be used as a portal for the Hannans suppliers and retailers, as well as attract boomer browsers who are looking for something with a bit more zest than zimmer!

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Drupal Mini Con - excellent!

Thanks to the 40+ people who attended our first Drupal MiniCon. It was a lot of fun and we can't wait to do it again next year.

Thanks especially to our sponsors Taniwha Solutions (whose principal Simon Roberts gave a valuable talk on caching) and Lonely Planet (lead developer Gordon Heydon spoke edifyingly about ecommerce) and us, Em Space.

Also, thanks to Simone Cresp of the Alley Bar who eased the way so elegantly.

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