Over the past few weeks, I've been working on designing the interface for the upcoming NextMedia International Interactive Media Festival that's going to be in Banff at the beginning of June. It's been a fun, if slightly ironic, project to be working on and the preliminary site was launched just a few days ago.

When we ran our Zap Your PRAM conference in the autumn of 2003 we happened to choose the exact same dates as the NextMedia conference, which happened to be in Charlottetown that year (seriously we had no idea it was on). We admittedly said a few not-so-positive things about what they were up to back then, mostly in favour of what we were doing with Zap Your PRAM. Then, about a month ago I was introduced to Julia Walden, the director of NextMedia, by a couple of friends from Ideé whom I met at none other than the Zap Your PRAM conference. Talk about weird karma. Julia was looking to get in an outside designer to work on the new NextMedia site and explained that the conference had new owners and was moving to Banff to be in sync with another conference their company is involved in, The Banff World Television Festival. And now, in a great bit of irony, the disparaging links from Peter's post now go to the website which I've been designing.

If they manage to secure a number of the speakers they're pursuing, which I think they might, it sounds like it will be quite an interesting conference. And, the price sounds just about right too especially if you're in the area. You might even see a few members of the silverorange crew presenting come June.

As I mentioned, the site only launched very recently and might be considered a preliminary launch. Expect the content to grow as the conference finalizes the speaker list, sponsors, and other aspects of the event.