George Liddle APDG

A big year,

Thanks to both Jane Healy and Caitlin Flett for their untiring commitment and support as administrators, throughout the year.

Our MENTORAPDG programme kicked off last year. This was something the guild had on its to-do list for a long time. Diaan and and Tobhi are to be congratulated for planning and delivering such an important programme for our guild.

Our Awards event, held in Melbourne for the first time, was a huge success. The Speigeltent was a brilliant idea!  Many comments I heard called it our best venue yet. Thanks to Aphrodite and the Melbourne committee for their efforts and thanks also to Tamara, Jane, Ashleigh, Peter, Fiona, Gail and Mark for a smoothly run event and judging process. I think we now have a great template for future awards events.

We are on the brink of launching our new and improved website. It has been a difficult and taxing process with many hours of intensive work put in by Caitlin, Peter, Dan and David. On behalf of the guild thank you for an effort over and above and thanks to Thomas for his help setting up the website 8 years ago and for his support over the years.

Fanfare!!!!!  This year marks the launch of the APDG Manual for Screen Design Practices, a huge effort from Tim, Fiona, Scott and the APDG Screen Committee. It sits neatly alongside its sister publication the APDG Designers for Live Performance Philosophy and Practice Guidelines.

Also, the Live Performance Committee created another very important document, the APDG Live Performance Standard Agreement. Thanks go to Stephen, Julie and everyone else involved for all their work on creating another important document that educates and supports designers in their professional practice.

Igor, Marta and Tim have represented the guild at the ASIG meetings which have been pushing to retain Australian content in the free to air networks and also to convince the government to mandate a 10% Australian content in the streaming services like Netflix. 25,000 people work in the industries affected which generates 3 billion in business and 250 million in exports.

Our first Brisbane event was held at Griffith Uni with Matt Putland and Wendy Cork sharing their experiences designing Winchester. Michael Rumpf organised that event and has developed a good relationship with Griffith Uni that bodes well for the future.

We are getting to the point of being truly national. Emma Fletcher has taken on the role of Chair of the WA Committee and is powering ahead. In the next few weeks the first SA Committee will be formed by Casey Van Sebille. Now we need to get Tassie and Northern Territory on board!

Lastly, many, many thanks to Julie Lynch APDG retiring this year from the vice presidency. She has been such an amazing driving force who has helped the guild immeasurably in helping get our guild to this point in our history where we are a powerful voice for design and designers. Julie will still be an active participant in the Live Performance Committee, so she is not lost to us completely, but we will miss her logical, cut true voice as our Vice President.