Australian Infront rebrands as Aus*Infront
It’s tough to offer an objective point of view about something I have a long, long history with like Australian Infront. I genuinely believe without discovering the site, and the community around it, I wouldn’t have a career. Before Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress or Blogger, the internet had discussion forums and news ‘portals’. Infront was part of a generation of early online creative communities that leveraged both to be an inspiration launchpad. Similar to it were Design is Kinky, Kiiroi, Surfstation, K10K and Newstoday (now QBN).
Infront, Australian Infront - no, Aus*Infront (will be hard to retrain myself into that!) went through a near death experience a couple years back, mainly through drift of authors and posters ie. neglect. From being a near constant user of the site, it got to a point where 6 months would pass without visiting the site.
After a lineup change and a rebirth as a commercial enterprise, the site has since grown and grown - to the point where a rebrand and re-emergence into it’s commercial maturity made a lot of sense. The new mark from SouthSouthWest gains the much needed energy and a touch of originality the previous lacked, whilst one might consider the asterisk to be a little too ‘portable’ a design idea. I think it’s definitely youthful and the new visual refresh of the site works well in partnership with the mark. It looks cool, it’s likeable.
Ahh well, the one that got away…
