Our wonderful, talented and irritatingly hipster friends over at Design Federation nabbed themselves an exclusive interview with The Dandy Warhols at Harvest Music & Arts Festival in Melbourne last week.

Just too cool for school. Congrats to them and yay for us!  They have let us share and share alike. Enjoy

Interview by Paris Thompson.

 

The Refugee Art Project presents fear+hope, a group exhibition by asylum seekers who live within Australian detention centres. Our friends at Design Federation caught up with Safdar Ahmed & Anton Pulvirenti to ask them about this exhibition that kicks off at the Mori Gallery in Sydney on Monday, 20th June 2011. Here is a snippet of what they had to say!

How did the Refugee Art Project begin?

Safdar: Anton and I both come from a fine arts background. We met and became friends at art school, in the year after I had finished high school, and have always shared a passion for talking and thinking about art. Last year I was speaking to a friend (the co-founder of this project, Dr Omid Tofighian) about refugee issues and it then occurred to us that an art exhibition might be a great vehicle for understanding the position of refugees in Australia. We started to visit the Villawood detention centre for art classes shortly thereafter, and Anton soon joined us to assume a teaching role.

Anton: My involvement began with an invitation from Safdar to join the project. As a long time friend, he was well acquainted with my art practice. He was also aware of the thesis I am completing at The Sydney College of the Arts on my grandfather’s internment at Loveday camp during the Second World War in South Australia. He thought that going inside Villawood would help me shed light on my grandfather’s experience in Loveday of which little is known.

How did you meet artists inside the Villawood detention centre and who are they?

Anton: Safdar had already met some artists. I knew no-one on my first visit. I sat simply sat down, commenced a portrait, and soon made new friends! The artists are predominantly from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iran and Iraq. They have all escaped some form of religious or political persecution.

Read the rest of the interview here .

What: The Refugee Art Project – Fear & Hope
Where: The Mori Gallery
168 Day Street, Sydney (5 mins from Town Hall)
When: 22 June – 8 July 2011
Open Tuesday, Thursday – Sunday, 11am – 5pm
Late night Wednesday, 11am  – 8pm
Cost: Free

Its finally here! The Federation Annual will be released at an exclusive launch party sponsored by Peroni and Nespresso at The Art Lounge kicking off at 7pm on the 25th November 2010. Design Federation called upon the many talents of their readership and supporters (the “Friends of the Federation”) for submissions to feature in this exciting inaugural departure from the virtual to the actual.

This print debut will serve as a striking visual showcase of the community in a beautiful, full-colour inspiration book. The theme of the book was “1” to celebrate the first book of its kind and demonstrate Design Federation’s solidarity with the Aussie design community.

All profits from The Federation Annual will be going to Mission Australia’s Creative Youth Initiative (CYI). Based in Sydney’s Surry Hills, CYI is a unique service that provides young people aged 16-25, who are facing many and varied challenges in their lives, such as homelessness, mental health issues, substance abuse, family breakdown, unemployment and early school leavers the opportunity to access professional and accredited creative programs. Design Federation has partnered with CYI to raise awareness for the program and promote their inspirational work.

The Federation Annual is available for $34.40 pre-order via the DF  Big Cartel site

Our friends at Design Federation have launched their new stella website. It’s slick, smart and sophisticated. If you haven’t checked it out yet, do yourself a favour and have a peak!

Design Federation is an independent platform for Australia’s creative community.  They are a web-based information exchange hub for the latest in design news, events, projects and emerging identities in the region.

There aim is to support and promote the up-and-comers, the kids, the battlers and the under-dogs of the Australian creative community. They have created a platform for the design community to gather, network, collaborate, support and learn from each other. They organise events and artistic projects that encourage innovative partnerships and keep the readers up to date on all things inspired.

Celebrating three years of dedication to the Australian design community, Design Federation is hosting its inaugural event on Friday the12th of February. In honour of the website’s dedicated readership and supporters from the local and web community, the Design Federation founders, Klaus and Craig, chose the theme of this Chinese New Year – the year of the Tiger – to capture the spirit of creativity, courage and tenacity.

Extending an open invitation to the followers of the site to contribute their artistic creations to an exhibition showing throughout the night, utilising the unique venue space of theclub nightclub in Sydney’s Kings Cross, in what the organisers have dubbed Friends of the Federation.

Calling out to readers for submissions of their designs, illustrations, art, graffiti, film & video, fashion, photography, industrial design, custom toys, animation or any other artistic contribution, the Design Federation have been overwhelmed in recent weeks by the tremendous outpouring of talent and generosity, making for a fascinating collection on show for one night only.

With Tiger Beer and Bogong Valley Estate Winery sponsoring drinks, be sure to arrive early so you don’t miss out. If the old worldly charm of the venue and the quirky crowd aren’t enough to peak your curiosity, Julie Doye, pop art portrait artist and newest contributor to Paris Hilton’s personal art collection will be in attendance from 7:30pm painting personal one minute portraits of guests.

Prizes and giveaways will feature throughout the night, with Design Federation’s corporate supporters Sweat-Shop Productions and iStockPhoto digging deep to make the event a fantastic occasion for all involved.

2010 is the fortuitous Chinese Year of the Tiger !

The tiger is a fighter and we always back the underdog, so we are giving our loyal, lovely, creative readers the chance to bust out into the public view and make 2010 the year of putting it out there.

Putting our petty cash where our mouth is, we will be the first to step up and proudly announce Design Federation’s Friends of the Federation party on 12th February 2010.  Ringing in the new year with our first public event ever to celebrate the crafty kids who have made us what we are today.

And we want you involved!  This is a call-out for submissions of your work. We are looking for anything creative that can be displayed at the event, which is being held at theclub nightclub in Kings Cross (yep, we’re edgy folks.)

Send us your designs, illustrations, art, graffiti, film & video, fashion, photography, industrial design, custom toys, practically anything as long as you can supply it to us to use for one night in Sydney. Obviously it would be great if the work has not been displayed before anywhere but it is not essential.

Your work and name will be publicized on Design Federation’s website as well as affiliated blogs, sites and media outlets. You will be displayed on the night as part of the Friends of the Federation exhibition .

To participate in the event, please submit examples to events before Sunday the 24th January 2010.  Successful applicants will be announced the following week.

We will showcase one piece per person ( please limit example files to 2mb )

Be bold! Channel the Tiger and send us your stuff!

It’s not often you get to see how Australian films are put together. So it was exciting to see how The Combination progressed – from looking for people in a local newspaper, to early rehearsals in a small office space in the middle of Rydalmere (surrounded by industrial sites), and then finally to garnering screenings in some of the biggest cinemas across the country.

Australian films with violent Middle Eastern themes generally don’t have the government rushing to support them, and you would be right in recalling the old adage It’s not what you know. This rings true in most cases and that’s why we see so much rubbish on screen. In any case, it’s no surprise that while HoWARd was in power, funding to the arts diminished at a rate not seen since the great depression.

The Combination was put together with private funding and filmed mainly in Granville, which is why it’s great to see a movie like this finally make its way to the big screen.

The Combination is a story written by and starring George Basha, who grew up in Guildford and who, between stints as a tradesman, has had minor acting roles in other Australian films including Blackrock.

Directed by one of Australia’s most respected actors, David Field, The Combination will be his directorial debut. The film is produced by the lovable screenwriter John Pirrie of See Thru Films.

Filming was completed by none other than Toby Oliver of Looking For Alibrandi fame and was filmed on RED (you can read about it on his blog). The film was edited by Ken Sallows whose work includes the brilliant Australian film Chopper (Hi Chop!). So whatever you might think, you know it will look fantastic.

Will The Combination be anything like Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Café Lumière? No, It will be more like a Takeshi Kitano Flick, say Sonantine. Excitement, violence, and a few kicks!

http://www.thecombination.com.au/

The Combination is in Cinemas Feb 26th.

Article brought to you from our friends at Design Federation .

If life were perfect people would pay their bills on time. Sadly this is rarely the case and many a designer has been in the situation of what to do with an unpaid invoice.

We all love hearing “The cheques in the mail”, “Just waiting for some money to come in”, “Can I pay some now, and some later?”, “I will have the money to you on Friday, I promise”, “Can you resend your invoice again, I seem to have misplaced it” or even “The dog ate my emails”. We have put together a few simple steps to hopefully help you get paid on time, ease the economic crunch & give you a little extra for Christmas!

You can read the article right here .

As a photo editor and designer, we always have to ask the question ‘Where do I get the right pictures from?’ Until recently we used the traditional stock photo houses like ‘Getty images’, ‘Corbis’, ‘Jupiter images’, Alamy, etc. However we decided to explore the microstock world a little and was quite surprised about the quality of the pictures available on microstock. What we see as a problem of microstock sites is that the content of the microsites is very similar – you will find the same pictures on Dreamstime as on Stockxpert, Fotolia etc. We have listed my favourite microstock sites below – the 4 which are the most popular because they have the largest portfolios. We also added some smaller sites which we found interesting.

This article has been brought to you by our good friends at Design Federation. Read the full article here .

Don’t Ban The Can has had a change of venue. We have moved from Jewell station to Clifton Park, a bigger and better venue for everyone involved. Clifton Park is equipped with an amphitheater, wide open spaces and plenty of room to chill.

Where: Clifton Park, Victoria Street, Brunswick.
When: Saturday, September 20th, 12pm – 10pm
Train: Upfield Line – Brunswick Station (walk 2 minutes)