Palm are a company who specialize in pdas (personal digital assistants) which are ‘smart’ phones to you and I. They run palm, windows and web operating systems and have been around since the palm piolet in 1996.

Palm Phones

Their latest and most successful launch has been for the Palm Pre which hit our stores last autumn if I remember correctly and is available only on the 02 network. It’s direct competitor is the apple iPhone and although it has not seen nearly as good sales as the iPhone it is still quite an innovative and practical device. It’s big selling point over the iPhone being its capability to run more than one application at once meaning quicker and effortless navigation.

Working in e-commerce, Fiona’s Team Scope is to

• Deliver on a financial target and to help grow revenue.
• Create loyal and satisfied customers.
• Provide market intelligence to Palm.

A very interesting  point Fiona made about e-commerce compared to traditional commerce was that by doing business online, they can use real time market analysis. This means that if they run a campaign or offer that isn’t doing so well they can reject it or change it to be more affective within 72 hours. This is opposed to printing posters or flyers, creating tv or radio ads or generally spending a lot of money on a marketing strategy that won’t work. It saves the company wasting a lot of time, money and plenty of effort. Definitely a plus side to e-commerce.

Fiona showed us a diagram of the process taken from when the customer orders the product to having it shipped to them to the merchant reciving payment. This is similar to the diagram she showed us:

Online store

A lot of Fionas talk was about marketing and how to get people to visit and shop at their online store. Search engine optimization being one of the best ways for them to advertise because 85% of people use search engines to navigate their way through the internet. Another popular way is by search engine advertising which is when the company pays to have their link close to the top of the search results. There are many more ways of online marketing but I would be here all day talking about them so instead I shall show you another diagram which highlights some other ways.

Online Marketing

This is some info i found about digital advertising from the state of the net issuse 16.

Digital advertising:

Digital advertising will be the third largest medium in Ireland in 2010 and grow by 9% compared with an overall advertising market decrease of 7%, according to management consultancy Billetts.
As forecasters go, Billetts has a better class of crystal ball than others, as it audits budgets for major advertisers. The consultancy puts a value of €86 million on Irish digital advertising in 2009 giving it a market share of 10.6%, on a par with radio. Billetts reports that online classifieds took a “huge hit” last year, with revenues halved, but search performed well and is now the largest category within online.
In the UK, the most recent IAB statistics for the first half of 2009 show online as the largest single category, with a 23.5% market share. Similar research is to be commissioned in Ireland this year from PricewaterhouseCoopers by the relaunched Interactive Advertising Bureau Ireland (IAB Ireland). This is widely predicted to accelerate the growth of digital advertising in Ireland at the expense of traditional media.

Fiona told us about a successful online marketing campaign for ‘will it blend?’ so i thought i would throw it in for fun.

 

Robbie Ward was in today to talk to us about his company BPM Media which is based locally in Blanchardstown Corporate Park and is made up from a staff of four.

BPM Media is a company that specializes in advertising mainly within pubs, clubs, venues, retail outlets and shopping centres.

From their website they state that they provide:

- the right atmosphere at the right time for the right customers

- unparalleled digital signage opportunities for in-store advertising and branding

 - potential to generate a revenue stream from your in-store display screen network or audio system.

Robbie explained how they use video screens and sound to push products and services from within the business itself. He gave us an example of a music video they would run in the likes of ‘Buskers’ in Dublin.

He opened by saying “Relevance is King ” in this industry. He explained that by using the right imagery, sound and interaction, that they can create a feeling and atmosphere in a place. Showing dance or pop videos during the day in a quiet pub would not be relevant but instead perhaps highlighting the lunch specials or upcoming events may help sell their products.  

Robbie spoke about the importance of understanding your audience. They must look at

• who visits the venue, how often and when?
• how they must try influence them
• and they must use the customer data to create a profile.

It is also extremely important to design timely content. By using digital media, it can be extremely reactive for business needs. For example a digital menu display would be able to change throughout the day to show lunch, dinner specials etc. By using print, it makes these kind of changes quite inconvenient.

 Anything that is displayed must be ‘exciting’ because Robbie found when they were starting out that the adverts they were doing were quite dull and boring so they soon found out that like tv, unless its stimulating it won’t be viewed at all. Another important point was if something is advertised on-screen it must be available. We have all seen it before when a shop or restaurant leave a sign up with an offer that isn’t running anymore so by using digital displays they can be updated more efficiently.

He also stated most importantly that audio should be handles with care. Making sure the audio is clear and at an appropriate volume is crucial. It can be the difference between someone buying something or just leaving the establishment altogether.

It seems to be to be a great idea for business. I can see this kind of advertising becoming huge over the next few years with the improvement of technology and the costs becoming cheaper.

Adios

This week in CDM we didn’t have a guest speaker in to talk to us so instead we were to watch a Lynda.com video in the category of creative inspiration. I chose the video which is about an Italian designer named Simone Legno who is known for his “unique characters and colorful style”. Simone has made his work/passion into a global brand. Simone works within ‘tokidoki‘ which is an apparel production company that uses art and iconic characters like Adios, Mozzarella and Sandy. I know Adios but not the others…

Like a lot of illustrators he started drawing at a really young age and was noticed to have a talent at it. He was going to go on to study political science after high school but discovered some illustrator software from a friends brother and got really into it. He decided to go to design school instead. (Probably the right decision). He then became fascinated by the growth and popularity of the web and flash about 12 years ago and decided to make a website to showcase his work.

A lot of his work is his styled very Japanese. He really appreciated the clean and visual Japanese culture so he decided to base his work around it. Most people thought he was Japanese before they met him which is quite a compliment.

As a fan of skateboarding I really liked the designs he does for skate decks. He gives some nice tutorials on designing them on Illustrator which I might just have to come back to for some ideas.

Some chat with Simone:

• He says it always important to have a logo or brand but more important to have your own style.

• He reckons a great way to start design is on t-shirts because you can get your designs notice and I figure you could get a lot of feedback.
• He reckons his cute characters aren’t just for kids because it is pop culture for anybody.
• For the future he wants to develop his style but now he wants to get back to painting more than he has time for.

Skate

His advice to anybody that wants to become a designer is that you should never feel you are finished ,that you should have a hunger for new ideas and to never stop working because there will always be someone out there better than you Until next time………

Cathal Brugha

Michael Collins

Good afternoon to my many many fans who keep up to date with my blogs every week. This week was a goodie in Creative Digital Media for two reasons. One, we went on a class trip to Dáil and Science Gallery and two, we get a nice little break for two weeks for our Easter holidays. Being a student has many benefits.

So on Tuesday the 23rd the 3 class groups met up on Kildare Street at the wee hours of 11am to visit Leinster House. The tour was arranged by our lecturer Clodagh Lynch and Ronan Mullen who also works at Itb. Ronan was able to set up the tour because he is actually a senator in the Seanad. Ronan is an independent whose constituency is the National College of Ireland and so was elected in by college graduates from the likes of Trinity, Maynooth, Galway etc.

This was the first time I have ever been to Leinster house and to be honest I never even thought I’d be too pushed to go. Politics are not something I have really taken too much interest in over the years which I know is terrible but ya know, we aren’t all perfect. It is just something, that as much as I’d like to know more about, often bores me to tears. Saying that though I’m really glad I went because it was extremely interesting and I definitely learned more about the system of Government we have. I think the one and only time our political system was explained to me was in primary school which is over 10 years now. Ridiculous. Ronan also gave us a good talk last week to prep us on the history of our republic, our constitution and the 3 powers of government in Ireland. It helped having the background in my head so when I had my wander around I knew what the two houses did. I’m not going to get into it now because I’d be here all day writing about it so heres a nice link to wet your political taste buds: http://www.oireachtas.ie/parliament/.

So yeah, we went inside so we did for a cup of coffee. I was expecting a quaint coffee shop but no, of course it was a full bar that we went into. I never would have thought there was a bar in the house. The tour guide took us around firstly to ‘An Dáil Éireann’ and it was great to actually see the place where it all gets done. It was smaller than it looks on telly

Some facts about the Dáil:

The current, 30th Dáil has 166 members.

Members are directly elected at least once in every five years by the people of the Republic of Ireland.

The Dáil also has exclusive power to:

• Propose the budget (which may not originate in the Senate).
• Ratify treaties.
• Declare war or permit the state to participate in a war.

The current Dáil derives from the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, but claims a direct line of descent from the ‘First Dáil’ of 1919.

After lunch we went to the science gallery at Trinity College. I had a very different picture of what that was going to be in my head. I was let down quite a lot. It was simply a single exhibition called

HYPERBOLIC CROCHET CORAL REEF: A WOOLLY WONDER. It’s a woolly wonder how it became a display in the first place. It was bits of crochet reef which was put together by plenty of different people. There’s also some sort of confusing science behind it so here’s a link to the site because it really don’t want to explain it: http://www.sciencegallery.com/.

So that was it. Leinster House was great and the science gallery, not so much. Thanks again to Ronan for setting it up. Later folks.

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.

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.

Motion graphics is something that interests me because so many of  the Hollywood films that have been coming out in the last 10 years are using them. I don’t know a lot about the technicalities behind it but I look forward to hopefully learning them.

Ron lives in a place called Blakely Harbor Park in Washington but works in the film and tv industry with a lot of his work coming from Hollywood. He talks about how the improvement in internet technology allows him to work from home because a lot of his work can be uploaded around the world instead of having to be done in a studio. I thought that was brilliant. Making money right from my home would be amazing.

So like many people in the digital media world Ron has a colourful background that has shaped the way he works today. He wanted to do fine art in college but ‘blew it off’  and went to California. He got into a print shop doing art for sportswear which lead to logo design. He then got a job doing graphics for a news company which lead onto computer graphics in 1985 and it all rolled from there. He talks about how now in his career he would like to define what he does rather than doing too many different things. It always interests me to hear when people in this industry are constantly doing different types of work because as someone who likes variety I’m excited to see where I end up.

Ron got to work on some big films such as Xmen and Last Samurai where he created matt paintings. Mostly they are backgrounds or add ons to sets to make them look much more realistic. I never knew this was done and some of his work is unbelievable. It look so real! Here’s one from his webpage:

Matt Painting

This guy is the king of Photoshop. He is given hig definition photographs and it’s his job to change them and make them fit into the background. He shows a painting done for speed racer which is 12,000 pixels wide! Working in Hollywood demands amazing work and Ron is fantastic at what he does.

Emma is currently a visual artist who hails from Wexford and she came to talk to us about college and what she has been doing since. Emma graduated with an MA from the Fine Art Department of the National College of Art and Design Dublin in 2008. She then went to New York on an internship in the Guggenheim museum where she practiced in new media. Sounds like an excellent opportunity to get to learn in such a place and Emma said to us if we get a chance to do an internship we should definitely go for it. I’d love to as it would prepare me for the actual working world instead of me wandering into something I’m not going to like. Last year, I think it was, she undertook an artist residency in Limerick City Gallery where she and a few other artists created an installation and she’s currently based out of Redspace studios in Dublin.

During the talk Emma showed us the work she has done for her masters and her other creations since leaving college. Being honest they weren’t really my cup of tea but they were quite different and showed a lot of creativity. So each to their own I guess. “Play and humour are used as tools to provoke thought, as well as entertain, in Emma’s practice.”. I found this line on her website and it describes perfectly (from what i’ve seen) what she is all about. Most of her work looks like fun and is very audience interactive too.

For example she showed us ‘Rexotrek’ (great name) which is what she did for her masters in ncad. It was to try show that a dog can be happy. Apparently scientists haven’t proven that animals can be ‘happy’. This fits into the theme of Science vs Pseudo Science and is a running theme through some of her work. She recorded audio and video for a few months by attaching equipment to her parents dog and brought it to different places like parks, the beach etc and let it run around. She used devices such as GPS, mini CCTV camera, mini-disk recorder with a VOiP headset. I had to laugh when she was telling us about running around after the dog with her laptop in her hands trying to record the footage. For her masters she set up an installation in a gallery where people literally had to get on their hands and knees to see the footage of the ‘happy dog’ running about.  

She has done some other art projects like ‘hugs’ that can be seen on her website http://www.emmawade.com/index.html which are quite interesting.

Until next week.

This thursday we had another guest speaker in to talk to us from the digital media world about what they do, did and plan to do. His name was a series of letters that when put together became Ian Cudmore. At first I was impressed by his voice by the way it seemed to echo mysteriously but then later realised the mic was on up the front. This shattered the illusion.

Ian is a self employed wanderer of the digital media industry who has dabbled in quite a few corners like flash, short film making and editing. He has now narrowed his skills primarily into editing which is what he says he does when someone asks him “what do you do?”. I was surprised and interested to find out he actually got his undergraduate degree from NCAD as a product designer (correct me if thats not quite it) and then got into digital media afterwards through a masters in Trinity College Dublin. I guess it shows once you have a creative flare and a passion for something that there isn’t that much of a transition between such fields.

Once freed from college Ian was looking for projects to get stuck into and was fortunate to get in touch with a Scottish musician (through Myspace) named James Yorkston and was asked to go over to him to create a promo video(an epk) for his album . Ian shot elements of him playing, composing, speaking and then edited it into a short video to be sent along with the album to the record label. He told us how it was more for the opportunity and experience that he did this. I thought it was very cool. Something I hope to do when I’m done here is to get into the music sector to film gigs, interview musicians, make music documentaries or whatever. Ians done a fair bit of this stuff so I was loving checking out his final products.  Ian’s also done a lot of filming with Lisa Hannigan including an epk for ‘Sea Sew’ which is her latest album. I threw Ian’s name into YouTube this evening and had a look through some of the videos he edited for Lisa and her band. Theywere playing down in Dingle in a great little pub called Dick Macs (where I’ve had a few nice pints before) and they are a fantastic collection. Check it out.

Overall I really enjoyed the talk he gave as did everyone else. His approach was very casual and he genuinely seemed keen to be talking to us. He’s not finished college too long really so to hear someone quite new to the industry really enjoying himself and to see him experimenting with new ideas and challenges got me quite excited for when I’m out there, getting work and meeting interesting people. Hopefully we get some more speakers as interesting and genuine as Ian. He’s also a Kurt Vonnegut fan He showed us Vonnegut’s explanation of drama –> Brilliant.

ICAN have quite a few services to provide their clients:

I had a browse around their website to find out more and it’s quite impressive. Some of the companies they have done work for are eircom, trocaire, jobs.ie, 98fm, aerlingus, the world rally championship, Volkswagen and absolutely loads more.  It is one serious portfolio they stand upon and from looking at some of their work I can imagine they will be around for many years to come. They even have a large collection of awards with the latest one being from the digital media awards last year, for the best digital advertising/marketing campaign.

Edward explained the most important thing they do is work on converting. Converting is when a person sees their ad for example and clicks on it or opens it, becomes a member, makes a booking or a sale. Basically pointing the consumer in the direction of their client. Makes sense. The reason people are advertising online is because it’s there’s a clear return on investment, everybody these days are going online and we can have more interaction/engagement with an online ad than most others.

He also talked about how things are run at ICAN and how they go from first meeting the client to coming up with a final product. First order of business of course is to meet the client then come up with a strategy, then a brief. From there they would brainstorm, create a proposal then a concept of the campaign. These are the most important steps on the road to a finished project.

I found Edward to be a really good presenter and he kept me interested. This was the first lecture where I got a proper sense of the working world in digital media and I liked it. I could see myself working for a company like ICAN in the future. It looked fun, creative, challenging and I got a feeling he was quite proud of his work.

Geraldine was in to speak to us about learning styles that are appropriate to studying in digital media. She explained that there are different ways in which people take in information and that we fall into certain categories. These are some of the learning styles she spoke about:

Overall I enjoyed the lecture and it was interesting to see there were others in the class who learn just like me. It helped explain why certain people are better at doing different things than others and it will help me focus more on how i learn and hopefully will make college that bit easier