This weeks guest lecturer was Fiona Kelly .
Fiona is a designer and project manager who has worked in the digital media business for the past 15 years and in this lecture she showed us some of her recent work. She runs the website www.glimmer.ie which is a portfolio of her digital projects. It showcases the different websites, adverts and animations she has created or collaborated on.
The first thing that she explained to us was that nothing is truly original and it is perfectly acceptable (if not necessary) to get ideas from other work before we begin creating things ourselves. She gave us this quote to think about by Jim Jarmusch “Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from
that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft)
will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent.
And don’t bother concealing your thievery
- celebrate it if you feel like it.”
Before Fiona tackles a website she will look at many other websites and take small ideas from them to incorporate into her final design. She uses sites like Smashing magazine, iStockphoto, Digg and delicious to help her get inspiration.
This led us on to some of her recent project and the various steps involved to get to the final product. Fiona obviously has a keen eye for design and I+ really enjoyed seeing how she developed a logo from the preliminary images all the way down to the customer approved final piece. This is the final design that was chosen for the Scooter Island logo:
Throughout the design process Fiona might buy the some images from iStockphoto that fit the theme of the project, even if she does not use them for the current project they can be put into her catalogue of images and used in future projects.
The next design she showed us was for the Fat kitty Films logo.
This went through many design phases like the previous logo. As you may notice the little star vector in the top right of this logo is the same as the one used in the scooter island logo. As Fiona has the rights to this she can use it wherever she wants in her designs.
Glimmer.ie also makes flash banner adverts (something we recently had a go at ourselves). The success of an advert is based on the number of click-throughs it gets and i think this particular one for MyHome.ie got several thousand.
I really enjoyed this lecture. Fiona gave us a great deal of information about the digital media industry in the short time she was here. Her profession allows her to be creative and have great command over what projects she chooses to do. All this makes a job in this industry sound like a throughly rewarding one.
