UX Australia News

Archive for June, 2009

Badge design competition

29 June 2009

As we ramp up for UX Australia, we start to turn our attention to the details of staging the conference: bags and schwag; social events; the conference schedule; and that critical, but oft-ignored piece that every attendee carries with them – the conference badge.

We’ve been to a lot of conferences over the years, and worn a lot of conference badges. Most were pretty bare bones:

Steve Baty
Attendee

Sometimes they’d add my company; maybe let me choose a nickname; or leave a space so I could slot in a business card. Usually though, the badge was a utilitarian affair, and not very useful at that.

For UX Australia, we’d like to do better than ‘utilitarian’ – even with our badges. And we’d like to give you a chance to win something and help us in the process. That’s right: we’re running a design competition for our conference badges.

The Prize

We’re offering a one-year subscription to any of the products from Optimal Workshop (Optimal Sort for card sorting, Treejack for testing an information architecture or Chalkmark for testing an interface) valued at around AU$700.

The Brief

Design a conference badge that:

  • identifies the wearer to others
  • can be attached to a lanyard
  • is a lot more useful than that.

We don’t want to be too prescriptive; be as creative as you like. We’ll be judging based on how the badge improves the experience of attending a conference, and whether it meets the basic criteria above.

Submissions

To enter the competition you need to submit your design prior to midnight (AEST) July 19th. Upload your design to flickr and add it to the UX Australia group and tag it badgecomp. Your entry should include enough information that we can understand the concept – include multiple views if needed.

Judging will be carried out during the week of July 20th and we’ll announce a winner here by July 26th.

Keep an eye on the flickr group and comment on your favourite designs – we don’t mind a nudge in the right direction ;)

Conditions

The ‘winner’ will be judged by UX Australia and will be either the design we want to use or, if none are suitable, the best design. We won’t necessarily use one of the entries, but we hope to! If we don’t select your design we claim no ownership over it, other than whatever logos or marks of ours went into it in the first place. If we do select your design, by entering the competition you agree to let us use your design for our badges.

Files

Here are the source files for our logo (ZIP, 2MB). If you’d like any of the other images from the website, please let us know)

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Early bird registration ends 30 June 2009

25 June 2009

Only one week to go until early-bird pricing ends (midnight AEST, 30 June).

Here are five great reasons why you should register now:

  1. You’ll save money. Early-bird prices save you $100 on the main conference and full day workshops; and $50 on half-day workshops
  2. You could win free stuff – we’ll enter you in a draw for licences for Axure RP Pro and Saasu (thanks to our sponsors for these)
  3. You’ll hear first about any important announcements
  4. You’ll get to be involved earlier about important decisions about the program and social events
  5. You’ll be helping us plan ahead

And even better, you don’t have to pay straight away. You can register now and pay when you are ready. What are you waiting for?

Prices are:

  • Main conference, full price: $700
  • Main conference, full-time students: $300
  • Pre-conference workshops, full day: $450
  • Pre-conference workshops, half day: $250

Conference program

If you need more convincing, check out the fantastic content.

Four pre-conference workshops:

And 23 main conference presentations from 28 fantastic speakers, including a keynote presentation from Alex Wright, User Experience Director for the New York Times.

Early bird registration ends 30 June 2009 | No Comments »