Inventive Labs is a web development house founded by Virginia Murdoch and Joseph Pearson. Our software laboratory is a repurposed store-front in the heart of Collingwood, Victoria, Australia where Tim-Tams are usually in plentiful supply. If you have a taste for them, you should probably make a time to drop in and see us.

Though the laboratorial atmosphere is relaxed, we take our work seriously. We have many clients, some high-profile, some not, all great to work with. We build software for our clients that aims to be powerfully simple. If it's a public-facing website, we craft it to high standards of navigability and accessibility. The success of any website is determined, not by flashy graphics, not even by a wealth of content, but by the experience of its visitors.

If we're building a software application for a particular audience (whether it's your staff, your customers or yourself), our fundamental focus is usability. We follow standards where they exist, because usability is often a case of recognising familiar analogs, but as inventors we're not shy of breaking paradigms when we perceive a better way. The web is young, and there's a lot of imaginably better ways.

Virginia Murdoch

Virginia left payslips behind in 2001 for a career as a freelance graphic designer. In the years before Inventive Labs, she developed over thirty websites for small-to-medium businesses and individuals. Trained in print and web design, she has acquired a mastery of HTML and CSS—the fundamental building blocks of the web. But her skills and knowledge of server-side technologies are also strong: Ruby and PHP in particular.

Joseph Pearson

As Virginia's inventiveness tends towards interface design, so Joseph's tracks towards development. A programmer for nigh on a decade, he has worked on artificial intelligence for hit 3D computer games, user interfaces for NASA's commercial arm, and web-based documentation systems for Telstra's mobile network. At the same time he has been a participant in the movement for web standards, developing the influential 'Topographic View' used by web designers the world over to inspect the structure of their creations.