Singapore Web DesignerLOBBY45 2007 » AEN—Designer & Consultant

The Lobby has sprung back to life. I have written this article to give my readers a better understanding of my involvement in the creative industry and introduce to you a great community which you might be interested in if you are in the creative field. If you don’t know what Lobb45 is, let me give you a brief introduction. You can skip to the forth paragraph if you already know.

Lobby45 is an exclusive online creative community founded in 2003 by a group of people in the creative industry. The idea was to build and develope an invitation-only community where interested parties can apply for membership by requesting and submitting samples of their work. This highly-selective process made the community a very competitive environment and standards were often very high. You can be assured of genuine, brutally honest and constructive criticism of the work you post. This was the main attraction. Many were attracted to this environment but at the same time, it became infested with enormous egos.

Soon after Lobby45 was founded, Leeo, one of the administrators invited me to join their group. Leeo was a good friend of mine so I always felt that the connection had something to do with my approval, with my apparent lack of skills at that time. The first batch of members worked together to produce a public showcase of artistic work from our members. This public showcase was called the “Lobby45 Panel” and even till now we still call it by this name. The 1st Panel was designed and developed by me in Flash. Adobe4Dummies did the 3D work, Paul Stas and cYe (both administrators) did the backend. The community went well into 2004 and I went to the army for National Service. I became less and less active and eventually stopped posting. It was kind of Paul to have kept me as a member for the work I have contributed to the Panel.

If I remembered correctly, in 2006 Lobby45 got so inactive that it was on the verge of death. Some members left and some were just too busy with work and life to be spending time on a dead forum. Soon after that, the forums database ran into some problems and couldn’t be recovered. A temporary makeshift forum was setup and attempts were made to call back our old members to populate the community again. We weren’t successful. only a few of us hung on and kept our faith. I tried to keep it alive by posting every work I do. Those who were still around never failed to give the same good quality comments and critics. We believe firmly that the lobby hasn’t died.

This year, we managed to spring back to life and Paul managed to build a new forum, with a new server. This time, we the surviving members did all we could to revive the boards. We managed to call back most of our old members. At the same time, we got our public teaser going. It was somehow miraculous. Before then, it was a dead community, within a week or 2, we had a community with more than 20 members and a public teaser. It was all thanks to Paul and his never say die attitude and enthusiasm towards the lobby. He has obviously put in a lot of work and effort. We also opened up for requests with the launch of the teaser. According to Paul, the one handling all the requests, we had more requests than ever and he was practically tiring out sorting and posting requests for the votin g process. We were linked in cpluv and Design Is Kinky and the traffic was very promising.

Within 3 weeks we managed to gather 30 of our original 45 members and another 19 from new registrations. We are still receiving tonnes of requests and we have decided to expand the lobby into 2 groups of 45 members so in total we would have 90. New members make up the Regulars group and old members make up the Seniors group. Imagine a creative environment of 90 carefully chosen designers, artists, musicians, developers, etc in an established community well-moderated by old timers who have forged a community spirit that survived 2 years of inactiviy. That is what Lobby45 is today.

Some of the old members were appointed as administrators and that includes me. The current Lobby45 Operators (administrators) are:

1. Paul
2. Frederik
3. Aen
4. Leeo
5. Kevin
6. Stefan

If you are interested in being part of this great community, please visit Lobby45.com and submit your request. Instructions are on the page. Please note that due to the limited number of slots, requests are screened and voted by the community and we cannot guarantee you a place, you have to be good enough for us. Not trying to be arrogant but it is through this selective process that we are able to provide the professional and high standards to our community.