We’ve now won an Australian Good Design Award (GDA) for Design Strategy two years running. Last year it was Her Tech Circle, a national platform for women in tech, and this year it’s Screen Careers, an organisation training the next generation of below-the-line crew for Australia’s screen industry. Comparing the two projects side by side, there’s little they share beyond the category they were entered into. They’re operating in different industries, led by different founders, and appeal to different markets, which is exactly what makes winning this category twice worth diving into, and we’ll admit, mentioning more than once.
GDA’s Design Strategy category is judged on whether design has been deeply embedded as a working part of how a business runs and on whether that shift can be traced through leadership decisions, organisational culture, and the direction an organisation holds over time. Particular weight goes to evidence that the transformation was grounded in strategic intent from the outset, not applied retroactively to explain a result that had already happened by other means.
Design strategy is, at its core, a way of connecting creative problem-solving and user-centred design to an organisation’s long-term goals, and its effects show up in how an organisation approaches its products, services and market strategy, well beyond any single deliverable.
Two organisations with almost nothing else in common, held to that same standard from GDA twice, is a method rather than a coincidence.
Her Tech Circle: built to scale nationally
Her Tech Circle was founded because of two stubborn realities in tech: women leave the field at a higher rate than their male counterparts, and leadership pathways stay narrower for longer than they should. Yet there hadn’t been a platform built around how women in tech navigate their careers, only how the industry assumed they might.
Meeting that problem meant growing into a national, volunteer-led model early, likely earlier than would typically feel comfortable for an organisation of that size. Each local chapter needed to represent the brand in a way people would recognise. Every event, every piece of content, every mentorship connection needed a way to happen at scale without a large central team behind it.
We built the work to match that ambition. We gave Her Tech Circle a brand identity and messaging system that let it show up consistently nationally while still feeling relevant chapter to chapter. Underneath that, we built a full operating system, CRM, event templates, volunteer toolkits and content playbooks that let local leaders run their own programming, while the organisation kept ownership of its data, rather than leaving it scattered across whichever chapter happened to be holding it.
The result, as per Good Design’s own published record, was events running at capacity, strong volunteer involvement, new corporate sponsors, and direct employment pathways opening for members.
Screen Careers: built to track a career from day one
Screen Careers supports people building below-the-line careers such as camera assistants, sound technicians, and other roles a production depends on. The problem they were facing was almost the inverse of Her Tech Circle’s: not attrition from an existing career, but genuine interest in one with no obvious way in, from people who wanted to join the industry and simply hadn’t found where to begin.
Meeting a growing wave of that interest meant Screen Careers needed to reach a wider, currently underrepresented audience, while still managing support requests, events, course delivery and data collection by hand, the usual state for an organisation whose demand has started moving faster than the systems built to support it. And once someone had gone on to build a career through the program, there wasn’t yet a reliable way to capture that outcome or use it to make a case for further funding.
We scaled the work alongside them, helping Screen Careers develop a brand and content system that made them easier to find. Underneath it, we built a custom website, an integrated CRM, and an events and learning management system, bringing what had lived across several disconnected tools into one place. This meant the crew member’s path through the organisation, discover, participate, progress, became something Screen Careers could actually follow and support, rather than something it hoped was working.
The result: $1.4 million in funding secured from Screen Australia and VicScreen over four years, and over 500 event bookings in three months.
Solving problems with Pascal Satori
Design strategy is the method behind both projects. It’s the throughline connecting a women’s tech platform to a below-the-line training organisation, applied on purpose rather than repeated by luck. In both cases, we built what each organisation needed to grow into what it was already becoming, for the people they exist to serve, and for the people running them day to day.
You can probably pass our first win as a great project, but a second in the same category is an established pattern, and the pattern is design strategy functioning as a repeatable method for solving problems, applied deliberately and intentionally rather than hoping it lands by chance.
That’s the work we are proud to do and love to do day in and day out. The Good Design Awards tick is just one moment of recognition for it.
