George Liddle APDG

Scrolling through the APDG website, stopping on our history page and seeing photos of the inaugural steering committee and the list of founding members gave me pause to contemplate the past 10 years of our organisation representing the Australian design community in live performance and screen.

It was these members – Michael Scott-Mitchell, Catherine Martin, Ian Gracie, Steven Jones-Evans, Colin Gibson, Owen Paterson, and myself – that contributed $1000 each to fund the first APDG website. It was this generosity that really kick-started the APDG by giving us an online profile.

We have grown from a membership of 60 odd in our first year to over 400 current members.  We look forward to welcoming new members, as we expand across the country and bring more of our digital design colleagues on board. It has been 10 years of exciting development and growth due mainly to members who have volunteered their time and effort to make the guild work. We thank you all for your amazing dedication.

The 2019 awards are not so far away and we look forward, with great anticipation, of seeing the work submitted by our very talented colleagues.

Over the last decade, we have been witness to some brilliant design work from our guild members. These include Deborah Riley’s Emmy award winning work on Game of Thrones, Oscar and BAFTA winner Colin Gibson APDG for Mad Max: Fury Road and Catherine Martin APDG, Beverley Dunn APDG and Lesley Vanderwalt APDG on The Great Gatsby.

In live performance we congratulate Peter England on his Tony award for King Kong and so many award winning productions from Michael Scott-Mitchell APDG, Gabriela Tylesova and Jennifer Irwin APDG whose work with Bangarra is legendary.

These are just a few of our colleagues who not only are recognised in Australia, but have received the highest awards globally for their work. We have a design community to be very proud of and I am sure the APDG 2019 awards will produce more of the same.

Look forward to catching up at the awards.

– George