Fiona Kelly is a graphic designer, who works freelance. She owns her own company named Glimmer Digital Design. Graphic design is something I’ve always been interested in. It helped me to choose this particular course as I knew there would be some strong design aspects to it. The theme of her lecture would be Seeking Inspiration. Fiona started with a very relevant quote which I quite enjoyed

“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.”

Jim Jarmusch

Fiona gave us examples of websites where she herself would find inspiration. For example; iStockphoto, Twitter, Digg and FFFound. She went on to explain the process of designing. First she would research images for the theme she was looking for where she could draw inspiration for, the first example she gave us was a layout for a company named Scooter Island, who sold vespas. She would find images from the areas of Mod and Ska which are generally associated with scooters. Also, the iconography of pin up girls and other retro things.

The next company she made a logo for was Fat Kitty Films, again she went over the research phase where she would track down fonts and images relevant to the clients needs. In this case it was 1950′s iconography. Having done this arduous task she would select a handful of logos she mad and send them to the client awaiting feedback. The client would pick their favorite one and suggest adjustments etc. Alot of research work goes into this area, which was not something I was quite aware of before. Perhaps I can learn from this to produce better quality work with more relevance.

After this, Fiona showed us some of the web advertisments she had done for various companies. This was absolutly relevant as one of our assignments was to create two flash advertisments. She was very good at her work. Next up was a website she designed where she showed us that some clients can be very difficult to work for, even if you think your work is great, they may not thing the same.

Fiona left us with a very nice quote.

“TALENT… IS THE DESIRE TO PRACTICE”

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