Sixty40 wins Iron Designer crown

On Friday night, in front of a packed crowd of design fanatics at the Powerhouse Museum, animation and design specialists Sixty40 battled valiantly against independent ideas studio, Frost design, to win the coveted crown for Sydney Design’s Iron Designer.

Armed only with glue, cardboard, scissors and fluorescent post-itnotes, design teams were given just 20 minutes to create a design,which incorporated three key words revealed on the night. For the finalround, the words were; Oprah, reuse and red.

Matt Taylor and Mark Simpson (left) of Sixty40, won convincingly with theircreation: “r-Oprah”, a 3D glasses-wearing robot dog, who was to befundamental in Gen X’s mission to move from recycling entertainmenticons into a new way of thinking that will ensure pop-cultureconstantly keeps moving forward.

“The competition was fierce and the guys at Frost threw everything theyhad at the final round – but we are very accustomed to throwingcoherent ideas together in a collaborative, noisy environment. From thebeginning, we knew what would win in this performance focused situationwould be any of the 8 steps of any creative development: evaluate theenvironment, listen to the brief, add humour, add heart, add sex, addrobots, add puppies and let it be great,” said Sixty40’s Mark Simpson.

After much deliberation, the judging panel, including creative curatorand publishing guru Jess Scully (Creative Sydney, SummerWinter), TerriWinter (owner, top3 by design) and Ralph Myers (AssociateArtist/Artistic Director from 2011, Company B), unanimously awarded thewinner’s trophy to Sixty40.

This win follows a flurry of recent award wins for Sixty40 including aGold Global Promax for their TV1 Summer idents channel brandingcampaign, and three Silver Global Promax’s for the satiricaleducational series for Foxtel’s Winter Olympic interstitials. ThePromax awards are recognised internationally as the highest accoladefor creative endeavour in promotion and marketing across electronic andbroadcast media.”