Cork Eco Fuels are a start-up company who are initially going to be promoting and selling their “EcoBriq” product. The EcoBriq is an environmentally friendly smokeless briquette for use in both open fires and closed appliances. They are made from woodchips and sawdust – the waste material from processing other timber products. The EcoBriq will be available over the coming weeks.
Someone asked me the other day “What was it like working in Coventry?”, naturally, my response was “generally shit”, but then I remembered… oh wow… I got to work with The Specials!
Thanks to some rather excellent blagging by my cohort, Chris Dalton, we managed to bag a rather lucrative job rebranding The Specials for a comeback album, singles and tour – our first major freelance design project. This was a revitalised Specials (without original members Terry Hall and Jerry Dammers) who had got back together and recorded a collection of their own personal favourite tunes for the “Today’s Specials” album.
I guess every single one of us is sick of hearing the word “recession” right now. The sad fact is that just about every single one of us in business in Ireland is having to deal with its effects on a daily basis. Of course, not all those effects are necessarily negative. There are ways to take advantage of this current economic climate, particularly in the design world. Here’s how…
I just wanted to share with you my recent experiences with Adobe CS3 and the Bridge application in particular. For some time I’d been getting performance problems on my Intel iMac that were only partly resolved by restarting the machine. I had come to the conclusion that it was a lack of memory issue as, being a busy designer, I am running a lot of applications at once as I flip and switch from one to the other. That’s almost the full suite of CS3 apps, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Acrobat, Bridge and Dreamweaver, as well as Entourage, Word, Firefox, Safari, iTunes and Font Xplorer all running in unison. After a while the Mac would start slowing down and switching applications became agonisingly slow.
Ever wondered what qualities differentiate a good designer from a great designer? What assets to their personality will they have and what makes for a truly creative mind?
Over the years I’ve worked with many graphic designers, yet in my opinion, among them, truly creative thinkers have been few and far between. Sure, there are many who can learn how to use the tools of the trade to become competent creative artists, but as designers, our greatest asset and tool is our brain. Study, learning, exploring, experience and good mentoring can help unlock our natural potential, but I believe that creative thinking is not something that can be taught at design college. For those of us born with an inherent design thinking, this becomes our way of life and not just a tool implemented for the workplace.
