James Hilton, chair of the Digital Judges again this year and the creative supremo from AKQA gave us a quote for our site earlier in the year -
"Stock market crashes, record unemployment, knife-wielding 8 year olds, and swine flavoured killer flu. The world has officially gone to shit. Thank the Lord then for the Fresh awards – that beacon of light shining forth with its promise of shiny things to adorn mantelpieces, or at the very least keep that door open. So enter now and be merry, for tomorrow you quite possibly will be penniless and jobless. And dead. With a cold."
Now we don’t know whether it was the wise words of Mr Hilton or the change in format this year, but certainly something worked and even though we changed the time frame of the programme this year, there were still some real cracking entries making the grade in Fresh Digital 2009.
Yes times are tough and yes everyone is being a little more cautious with their budgets, but that didn’t stop some real celebration from the Digital Community this year – many of them first time entrants to Fresh.
So well done to Ian & the MI gang, and to Ben & The Neighbourhood, the Fuse gang, and Lightbox, WAA and Blueleaf and Bluecube and Hyperlaunch DMG and Cogapp and Code and Cuckoo and Whitespace and everyone else who picked up a gong and in our haste to get this on the site post event we might have missed!
And, we must give a hearty slap on the back to Matt from Flash Temple, our one to watch in Digital and our course the gang at Fudge who picked up Digital Operation of the year. Well done!
So Fresh Digital 2010. Once our hangovers subside and we get our thinking caps back on, we will start taking another look at it for next time round but we are always happy to take suggestions – and we know you are not shy about making those!
End programme.