Better than chicken

One of our new projects is about to be released.

It’s always rewarding when you get to be a part of making something beautiful. Not that a new website necessarily sounds like the most thrilling thing. Nando’s Chicken has a website. The Australian Society of Orthodontists has a website. Christopher Pyne has a website. But it can also mean the creation of something startling, compelling, and a little strange; the digital equivalent of a tongue in your ear.

The new Going Down Swinging site (or web portal, as I like to call it, when I imagine the average browser as a late-career Richard Dean Anderson) deserves those adjectives and analogies far more than it deserves comparisons to mediocre chicken snacks. It has been designed and built by GDS’s digital editor Vanessa Hughes, one of that rare breed of technical experts with the eye of an artist. It’s an ambitious project to make GDS something ongoing, developing and constantly changing. On my explorations of the trial versions, I’ve been consistently excited by the quality: at once aesthetically rich, structurally clean, and functionally simple.

Here’s what it will contain.

Audio / video broadcasts
From now on we’ll be recording any GDS performances in either high quality audio, high def video, or both. The results will be streamed online, with periodic updates. Podcasts of the audio can be followed in iTunes. We’ll also be partnering with some other events to bring further live words and music to your eyes and ears.

Get inside GDS
Read updates and stories from those who work or have worked at Going Down Swinging. Find out what we’re up to, what we’re planning, and how the production cycle works, as well as getting stories about the way things have been done from 1980 through to today.

The Blue Corner
Our new blog, The Blue Corner will bring together GDS’s community of previously published writers and artists under the stewardship of editor Meaghan Bell. Read regular opinion columns, discussions, debates, new stories and pieces, drafts and works in progress, anecdotes, forgotten publications, and anything else to give you a broader sense of the back catalogues and the personalities of those who have contributed to GDS over its 33 years. This year we’ll publish our 1000th contributor, so that community keeps growing.

Archive
We’ll also draw from GDS’s back issues to give you tastes of journals past, picking out those things that demand another moment in the sun.

Store
The new shop gives you images and descriptions of every GDS issue, right back to Ned Kelly raising his gloves on Issue #1. Some of those issues are still available for sale in print versions, while the older and rarer ones will hopefully be made available in e-book form at a later date.

Launch 
The site entire will remain under wraps until its launch this Friday (June 1), details of which are laid out below (artwork here by Vanessa’s equally talented sister Natalie). There’ll be a physical launch in Melbourne, and a general worldwide launch online. For the former, get in early, because the space will fill up, and it’s set to be a great night. Hope to see you there, or round the internet.

That’s www.GoingDownSwinging.org.au