The start of the year always proves to be quite slow for us so instead of busking on the streets of Bondi [in the hope that one would pay us to leave instead of sing] we took it as an opportunity to review our own website. I had set a goal for this to happen and much thanks to the efforts of our fellow designers Alex Dale and Austin [Anh] Vu we managed to relaunch in April. The new site was well received having been nominated for three design awards from industry leading web design showcases including Awwwards, CSS Design Awards and CSS Winner.

We continued our relationship and worked alongside Larissa Behrendt. Having successfully launched her filming company Lavarch Productions late in December 2013 we were at it again assisting with her author site Larissa Behrendt.

We worked on three ‘in-house’ projects for Fairfax Media during the course of the year. They included Weekend Compact, Good Food Project and Christmas Conversations. Both Anthony Gulin and Austin [Anh] Vu did a wonderful job in assisting me with these projects. The Christmas Conversation website was a challenging one that housed 12 competitions that opened on a day by day basis during the first two and a half weeks of December. We managed to write a custom script to support this functionality as well as collect and export each quizzes data sets separately. The team at Fairfax were equally impressed.

In May I met a successful and highly regarded kitchen and bathroom designer by the name of Dean Welsh. In 2014 he and his colleagues Tracy Stern and Angelo Musumeci launched a new kitchen and bathroom design business called thinkdzine. We assisted with the opening of their showroom in August and continue to provide design advice, search engine optimisation and social media marketing. I should also mention, whilst I am at it, Dean and I are currently planning for my bathroom to undergo a renovation early next year. I am super excited !!

By far and away our largest project of 2014 was Super Natural Skincare. This project involved product photography, user interface design, WordPress, video and eCommerce. It was a completely unique website based around a heavily customised WooCommerce theme hence took us a little longer than expected. At the same time however we managed to achieve a fantastic result.

We continued our relationship with our talented external designers. Janette Symonds from Squiggle Graphix teamed up with us to work on the South Terrace Apartments branding and website redesign which is closing in on a launch. Janette also helped us with both a website facelift and an email newsletter for our lovely friends/family at Shack Homewares. This followed the successful opening of their third store in the Homemaker Centre, Alexandria. Saffron Meade from Avenue De Flaunt partnered with us to complete a year long project and launch Gaddy’s Plant Hire. In amongst all of this we also worked on a mixture of branding, graphic and web design projects including Inspired Credit Management, Equity Portfolio Management, MyFrontman, Smiles Group, Kearney Consulting and Mad About Parties.

For me personally whilst I continued my part time teaching commitments throughout 2014 at TAFENSW I wrote and delivered a few successful commercial WordPress courses at General Assembly [GA] in Sydney. GA is a fascinating community training facility which runs courses, classes and workshops in web design, user experience and digital marketing amongst other things. I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching at GA and very much hope to continue building my working relationship with Elisia Retsas and the team.

What a year !! If you have managed to get through your coffee/beer/wine grab another one to toast the arrival of 2015 and celebrate it in style. Our team will be having a small break finishing up on Friday 19 December 2014 and returning on Monday 12 January 2015. As always I will still be contactable via email phillip@philbossdesign.com.au for anything that requires urgent attention.

Last but not least, raise your coffee/beer/wine as my fellow colleagues and I would like to thank all our wonderful clients for helping us continue to do what we love doing most. We hope you all have a safe, happy and wonderful Christmas and a fabulous New Year.