Blue Cadet Web design firm nominated for two Webby Awards

Annesha Taylor has short hair and is seated with a bright floral dress.
She’s speaking into a camera about her first reaction to finding she had become one of the 28,000 HIV-positive people living in tropical Jamaica.
“How was I going to tell my mother? The best way,” she pauses there, “is if I killed myself.”
It’s unsettling in all the worst ways. But it’s also a way to personalize the AIDS struggle on the Caribbean island, which now has one of the highest rates in the world outside the African continent.
Partnering with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and D.C.-based Joshua Cogan, design firm bluecadet interactive, newly based in the loathsomely-named Art Museum area, helped tell the stories of Taylor and others and package them on Live Hope Love.
They hope to have helped bring attention to the ongoing battle, led by South Carolina poet, activist and Jamaican native Kwame Dawes. While surely not they’re only end goal, bluecadet has won praise and honors.
Add another: bluecadet interactive was nominated for two Webby Awards, winning a People’s Voice nod in one, the company announced late last month.
See what got them the win, how bluecadet got the work and what’s up next, after the jump.
Founder and principal Josh Goldblum hasn’t bought his tickets just yet for the 13th annual event to be held June 8 in New York City, but he’ll be able to collect the People’s Voice Winner in the Web site Art category and hear his firm’s nomination for Best Use of Photography on a Web site.
Both nominations came for Live Hope Love.
“I think it’s important that we got the people’s choice award,” Goldblum says. “The type of site we do, there’s not that many examples. This is real interactive journalism at a time when people are looking for what’s next in news coverage. The people’s choice award shows there’s a demand for it.”
See other examples of their interactive Web news work here. Earlier this year they won the Best Music Site award at South by Southwest, among others honors.
The Live Hope Love project was a collection of minds. In 2007, the Virginia Quarterly was partnering with the Pulitzer Center to work with poet Dawes. They wanted a way to create a significant Web presence to capture the gripping account of HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, using Dawes’s poetry all to be couched with an essay Dawes wrote for the quarterly’s spring 2008 issue.
Goldblum, who still had bluecadet based in D.C. and was well connected there, was a natural fit. At the end of 2007, Goldblum and friend and photographer Grogan trailed Davis to Jamaica, beginning with Kingston.
“We were gaining the trust of these people, finding what poems really illustrated these stories,” he says.
They collected video interviews, narration from Dawes — recorded at a South Carolina radio station — and graphic photographs. It launched and not much happened at first.
“There wasn’t a real big corporation supporting this, so there wasn’t a lot of immediate traffic,” Golblum says. “But then we got attention from the Huffington Post and Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic, and then the awards came.”
Like being the only Philadelphia-based firm nominated at this year’s Webby’s.
Last year, Goldblum moved bluecadet to Philadelphia, nearer to friends, family and his native Willow Grove. His firm is already working with the American Revolution Center at Valley Forge and the University of Pennsylvania.
Other clients, from Philadelphia and nationally, are sure to follow.
But Live Hope Love and the attention it brought to the plight of people like Annesha Taylor isn’t something to forget.
“I’m proud of that. It’s growth was organic.” Goldblum says. “It’s that power of the Web.”