Good afternoon to you. This morning we had a guest speaker in by the name of Fiona Kelly from the company Glimmer Digital Design who (as the name suggests) works in the field of design. She does a lot of free-lance work herself but also Glimmer is part of the design collective FLK studio of herself and three other designers. This collective enables these designers to tackle projects together that would be too big for just one person.
She came in to talk to us about her work and to show us some of her designs from the last year or two. Her talk was primarily to give us some inspiration in creating our own designs by showing us how she operates and how her creative process is carried out. She began by telling us how nothing is original, which is a recurring topic I keep hearing from our guest speakers and our lecturers. I guess it is true that everybody is copying and refining everyone elses ideas. I’ve noticed myself already that anything I have done has come from someone else and adapted to suit my needs. It’s how the digital media world seems to grow and evolve. She was saying how you can get inspiration everywhere from looking out the window of a bus, to road signs, to shadows and anything around us. I totally agree because the more we see and take in the more we are learning and the more images and thoughts we grab for interesting ideas. I find that because I have an interest in photography that Im constantly looking at things as if I was looking through a lens. I see a nice setting, and I wonder how best it could be captured and framed. The same kind of principle goes
International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival - Glimmer Digital Design
for design.
Fiona spoke briefly of some websites she would look at quite often to see industry trends and also to get inspiration. The likes of smashingmagazine, twitter, digg, istockphoto, ffffound and del.icio.us are good examples of the type of sites worth keeping up to date with.
Fiona also created Fat Kitty Films with a few others to develop her film skills. She uses her graphic motion and design skills to help with their projects. She is also the maker of the companies logo which was one of the design processes she showed us today. She explained how she starts with an idea, gets it into digital format and builds on the idea by using an iterative design process. For example with the kitty logo (awesome logo), she gathered images she liked which were quite ’50s looking and then looked at different cat logos and came up with a preliminary design. For each new design she would save the last one and move to the next step which would be 1.1, then onto 1.2 and so on until the final logo is created.
Fat Kitty Films Logo
I was very impressed by the pieces of her portfolio that we saw. I also had a look at her website http://www.glimmer.ie/ and it is fantastic. The website itself is put together very effectively and well worth a look. Again this was another interesting and inspiring talk. Thanks Fiona.
