Established by the Victorian Government in 1996, the Victorian Premier’s Design Awards highlights and showcases design talent from across the state.

Our 2024 pro-bono project Madam Speaker, has been awarded Highly Commended at Victoria’s Premier Design Awards, a recognition that means a lot to us as an independent Melbourne agency, and as a team committed to meaningful design.

Madam Speaker is a project that lies very close to our hearts. Challenging historical gender biases in public discourse, the digital archive was created through a partnership between Your Creative and the Victorian Women’s Trust. It curates over 250 speeches from diverse women leaders, reimagining what an archive can look and feel like in a feminist context.

Behind the Design

Only 10 percent of archived public speeches in Australia are by women, creating a skewed narrative of authority and influence. Madam Speaker was developed to correct this, not just by collecting speeches, but by reimagining how they are presented, accessed and valued. 

The challenge: design a tool that feels open, inclusive, and culturally resonant, while being rigorous enough for educational and research use. It had to balance the gravity of public record with the energy of activism. All of this had to be achieved on a limited $50,000 self-funded budget, with no precedent for a feminist archive of this kind.

What does the voice of power sound like in your head? Madam Speaker asks this not as a provocation, but as a design brief. The innovation lies not in flashy technology, but in the deliberate blend of civic, feminist, and archival design languages—used to create a visual system that’s bold, respectful, and radically accessible. 

The solution is a carefully structured visual archive that blends civic design, editorial clarity, and feminist symbolism. The interface uses lined layouts, oversized quotation marks, and activist-style annotations to mirror the visual rhythm of speech. Categorisation by theme, not identity, encourages broad exploration across topics like climate, justice, protest, and the arts. Designer Eileen Li hand-illustrated the hands of every woman who worked on the project, embedding care and authorship throughout. The system supports public submissions, with moderation flows to ensure accuracy and respect. Built as open-source and WCAG-compliant, Madam Speaker is designed to scale as a national and global resource.

Since launching in January 2025, Madam Speaker has reached thousands of users across Australia, including hundreds of schools, universities, media organisations and advocacy groups. Over 250 speeches have been published, with more submitted weekly by the public. Most importantly, Madam Speaker has created a culturally specific, design-led model for public memory that is accessible, powerful, and grounded in Australia’s social context, with global potential already in motion.

Check out the winning entry and our case study.