Newism is a Newcastle, Australia based web design studio that is on the outer edges of new technology creation. This trio, composed of Wayde Christie, Leevi Graham and Anthony Short are heavily involved in the open source community and bring a knack for inspiring designs to all of their work. Newism has completed several high profile projects in just their first few months of operations, and are quickly building a reputation for putting out work that consistently exceeds expectations.

Many programmers start companies each year and it can often be a slow build, what do you think has made Newism successful right off the bat?

We’ve done a lot of ground work to get where we are. A lot of that time was spent contributing to the ExpressionEngine community by way of Leevi’s library of free extensions, and that goodwill has been transferred and associated with Newism right from our inception. We got involved, developed a reputation, and when the time came to launch there was an immediate buzz and we were able to hit the ground running.
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Cammaert&Eberhardt is a design studio in Barcelona, Spain specializing in the editorial design of books and printed matter. Founded in 2008 by Juan Carlos Cammaert and Christine Eberhardt, they have already produced an impressive group of work. We here at Harvest are fans of C&E’s designs and are excited to have them in the Harvest New Founders Program. In an era where nearly everything is digital, online, and intangible it’s wonderful to meet talented and creative people making a classic medium more beautiful through art you can hold.

How and why did you start your own graphic design studio? And why books?

Christine and I were both working for third parties and on occasional freelance projects, but we were both a little tired of designing online graphics, which for us, had lost its motivation a bit. We had always liked working with typography and photography and the smell of freshly printed paper so decided to focus on publications and book design which gives us access to projects that are more exciting and with more rewarding results.

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Dr. Peter Morse is a science-communicator, videographer, researcher and hi-tech visualization man who has made a career bringing unseen corners of the Earth to life on planetarium and video screens across the world. Peter has successfully made the jump from academia to a career in the private sector. He’s explored primitive life under the Antarctic seas, gotten friendly with ancient mummies and enjoys a good loaf of homemade bread. Peter is a man for all seasons, and he uses Harvest to keep his time and projects in balance.

After ten years of working in the academic world, why did you decide to venture out on your own?

I’d been working extensively with high-end computer visualization systems on a whole range of research projects: looking at how to visualise Antarctic data, working with century old stereoscopic glass-plate images, experimenting with game engines and virtual reality applications. It was a constant struggle to find research funds and time to work on these projects amidst the seemingly endless demands of teaching, applying for grants and often pointless administrative meetings. I had the horrible fear that I would wake up one day having become one of those academics who has worked in the same place for 20 years, become thoroughly institutionalized and done nothing else with their life. One of the paradoxes of academia is that you get older and older, but all your students stay the same age! The last straw for me was finding out that my supposedly ‘tenured’ position was coming up for redundancy. The entire department I worked in is to be closed down next year.

I decided to take the plunge and see if the skills and talents I had after 10 years of highly focused work could be turned into self-employment in innovative digital media projects. Happily this has turned out to be the case and far exceeded my expectations.

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Our latest New Founders, Swordfox Design, was founded by a couple who met in London – Graham was the lead developer at Underwired, while his girlfriend Georgina was a senior designer at Galzier Design – and headed back to their hometown, Queenstown, New Zealand, and started their new business.  In this interview, they recounted how Swordfox started with a website for a hot air balloon business, what it’s like to run a business in Queenstown, and shared with us their fascination with Britain’s Got Talent.

Why and how did you start Swordfox?

We started Swordfox because Graham and I (Georgina) began doing after hours freelance work for companies in London, so we all of a sudden had a loose idea of starting a company (unsuspecting of the long hours that were to lie ahead!).

Georgie’s (co-owner) visa finished up in London early 2007, Graham (life partner & business partner) of course followed (!) and it was back to New Zealand where we thought we would get jobs in Queenstown and just do some Swordfox freelance work on the side. I (Georgie) started working for my old company, Graham for his parents hot air balloon business. That lasted about a week due to word of mouth of Swordfox and our work. Week after week after week the workload increased. We started off with small clients, and lower priced jobs, had some interest from bigger companies who were interested by our work.

It was only a matter of months where we grew our portfolio (from clients that trusted and liked our work), moved into central premises, upped our anti, and now we have won most of the pitches for bigger companies, competing with other design companies that have been established for years. It’s all been achieved in our first year of business so we’re pretty happy.

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I’m sure all of us have had the experience of purchasing a piece of software and being frustrated at our inability to fully utilize the program. Our latest New Founder, Mavens Consulting, wants to provide that bridge between technology and business users.  They want to help businesses better utilize the software they purchase, make better business decisions and improve their efficiencies with technology.  In Mavens’ own words, they want to help even the odds for their customers, by giving them the advantage they would otherwise not have.  We’re excited to have them on board, and we had the opportunity to chat with the founder of Mavens Consulting, Prasad Kanumury, in the following interview.

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Our latest New Founders operate out of the historical city of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, USA) and grew out of the coworking environment at IndyHall (founded by Alex Hillman and Geoff DiMasi).  Round3Media was founded by three partners – Alex Hillman, Ken Rossi, and Bart Mroz – who describe their new agency as “an experiment in scaling Indie culture into business process.” In the following interview with Round3Media, we chat about the Philly start-up scene, Round3′s future plans, and their current involvement with a venture called Seesmic.

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This month’s Harvest New Founder named themselves after the once-believed mythical creature, Giant Squid. But unlike the deep-ocean squid of tremendous size, this St. Paul Minnesota design studio is small and nimble. As you’ll find out from the following interview with the Squid’s founder, Reid Peifer, his studio has giant-size ambition and plans. In less than a year of existence, Giant Squid Industries have completed several online projects, made a few amazing silk-screen prints, created a couple of brands, and amidst it all, found time and given back to the community. We’re proud to have GSI as part of Harvest New Founders Program, and hope you enjoy the interview.

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The latest addition to the Harvest New Founders Program is Poppy Copy, a copywriting studio in Brighton. Relly Annett-Baker started her career as a writer for music media outlet, and later wrote for the web when she joined her husband’s web design company. Poppy Copy came into being last year (2007), and Relly now runs her own company on the top floor of her townhouse.

We’re excited to present New Founders Program’s very first copywriting studio. In the following interview, Relly gave a few tips for all of us small business owners, explained why time tracking (and Harvest) is important for copywriters (thank you, Douglas Adams), and we coaxed her into telling us the secret behind the environmentally concerned bee.

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This month Harvest New Founders Program brings you Core Industries, an interactive marketing company with an environmental focus. Coming from years of experience working with an impressive roster of clientele, founder Corey Szopinski started Core Industries to help environmentally responsible businesses strengthen their marketing designs and concepts.

In this interview, Corey tells us about why he thinks bringing a green business model to clients is important. He gives us a glimpse into a current project, one where a renown automaker is working on an environmentally responsible campaign while Core Industries is helping build the tools to do so. Corey also walks us through the office, showing us how a typical project at Core Industries is run and managed, shares some of their tools of the trade, and chats with us about the exciting opportunities up ahead for the company.

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This month, Harvest chats with Stephen Hodde of SoundSpank, whose work
is at the forefront of interactive online sound design. With a background in music production, Stephen combines his skills and experience with the latest technology to create entire emotional experiences through his audio creations. The span of his work includes
sound and music design for commercial and movie sites, including the
spectral-sounding suite of effects for 30 Days of Night by Big Spaceship, a Sony Pictures production.

In this interview, Stephen tells us about how the sound and the music
come together, how he keeps track of the business side of things, and
what else SoundSpank has in store.

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