Big West Festival is a community-based, contemporary arts festival presenting multicultural and multi-artform events in venues, cultural sites and suburban streets of Melbourne’s western suburbs.

The theme for the 2015 Festival was ‘Open House - The Inner and Outer World of the House’. One of the Festival's key events was the building of a shell of a house, designed as a prototype for a model of affordable, social housing, particularly for single women-headed households. As well as offering a sustainable solution for social housing, the project aimed to raise awareness of increasing homelessness, particularly of women, in the western suburbs.

The design brief was to create an uplifting and celebratory festival identity that subverted notions around the placement of art in daily life. The Big West Festival pointedly takes art off its pedestal: performances spill out from venue to street to parking lot; local traders rub shoulders with artists; the prosaic is transformed into the imaginative. And all set against the backdrop of a rapidly transforming, utterly original and always surprising landscape of the west. 

Reflecting on our own personal experiences in Footscray, Atticus created a design that aimed to embody this charming and often schizophrenic landscape. Our concept for the festival was an illustration of community members exploring the many chambers, colours, and textures of Footscray. Beautiful, kooky, ugly, blinding, and poetic.

The Australian Education for Sustainability Alliance (AESA) is comprised of organisations from the education, union, youth and environment sectors that want a higher prioritisation of sustainability in the education system.

Atticus Design was engaged to create a suite of design solutions for the Getting Started with Sustainability in Schools project - including identity, website design, illustration icons, and website development - aimed to engage educators on the topic of sustainability, and to encourage them to include it in their daily teaching. A responsive website was created for teachers to access and navigate content whether researching information out of class, or on the fly in the classroom.

Atticus worked with the clever chaps at Long Division Digital to develop the website for this project.

www.sustainabilityinschools.edu.au

Weather patterns in Queensland in Northern Australia can be highly unpredictable, delivering anything from severe drought and floods, to tropical cyclones. Red Cross Australia and Emergency Management Queensland provide support to communities affected and displaced in these situations. The Emergency Management Handbooks provide guidance to support personnel working in evacuation centres when these types of disasters strike.

Our design needed to be informative, highly accessible and easy to navigate for volunteers and professionals involved. Each book contains detailed information, diagrams and quick-reference materials. The design features illustrations of iconic Queensland imagery across the suite of handbooks.  

Printed on a waterproof synthetic stock the books are able to withstand use in any situation come rain, hail, or shine.

Set in the surrounds of Warrawee Park, the Oakleigh Music Festival, presented by City of Monash, celebrates all that is local in food, art, music and culture.

Our concept for the festival identity showed how Warrawee Park comes alive during the festival, and that it’s not just community members that get involved. The tall gum trees in the park provided the perfect backdrop to illustrate a menagerie of wildlife busy cooking up a storm and performing on musical instruments, entertaining the community below.

Kids Thrive is a not-for-profit organisation that works with schools in disadvantaged areas across Victoria. Their programs tackle issues that children experience arising from trauma, disadvantage and cultural conflict; and expand children’s creativity, communication and social skills.

Aided by illustrations from children participating in Kids Thrive programs, we created an annual report that expresses both the inspiring work of the organisation, along with the creativity, resilience and optimism of the young people it engages with.

To view this and other annual reports we’ve created for Kids Thrive over the years, go to kidsthrive.org.au.