"For The Love Of Progress"

Calling all creatives! New "For The Love Of" brief, "For The Love Of Progress", on our website here.

FTLO is a platform for Irish creativity. We showcase Irish creatives' work in one space. We believe collaboration is essential and that the creative community should be working as one to make great work in every discipline.

Innovation, accessibility and public involvement are necessary for great work.

FTLO has featured at Offset, Electric Picnic, PhotoIreland Festival, Castlepalooza and spoken at Pecha Kucha and Candy's SweetTalk.

Black Church screenprinting course (July-August 2011)

For the past 6 weeks I have been taking screenprinting classes in the Black Church Studio,Temple Bar. I decided to do a project on New York and used imagery I had taken from the city during my visit in 2009. When we were walking down Broadway one morning a poet/musician, Joey Chang, was sitting on the street with a typewriter on his lap. He asked us if we would like him to write a poem for us, we just needed to give him a start-point. We told him this was our first time in NYC, so he wrote us a poem based on Irish folks first coming to NYC and how we have become part of the city's culture. This is what the first set of prints I did in Black Church are based on. The second set of prints are from images I took in the Village Vanguard jazz venue in West Village and the Guggenheim.

A Perfect Circle with Daniel Eatock

During Offset 2010 I had the curious privilege of participating in Daniel Eatock's "One Minute Circles" project which he was working on when I met him. Here's my circle...she's a beauty! You can view Daniel's complete project here.

Great series of lectures from SVA, New York

"Designer as Author: Paul Rand Lecture Series", some insightful thoughts on design. Steven Heller's 'Iron Fists' lecture on branding the Totalitarian State is particularly worth a watch.

Irish Duo 3rd at European BestYET creative advertising competition.

Congratulations to David Bowan and Ross Hardiman from McCann Erickson who came 3rd when representing Ireland at the BestYet creative advertising competition in Croatia. Twenty two teams from eleven European countries took part in the competition which is aimed at encouraging young creative advertising professionals starting out in their careers. Great achievement from the two lads.

"For The Love Of" in group discussion at eDIT Festival 2011

FTLO (myself and Shane O'Driscoll) were delighted to be asked by eDIT Festival to be part of a group discussion on starting up your own business during a recession. The discussion took a Q&A format and was arranged by Dublin Institute of Technology tutors and students. Other people involved included Block T (Smithfield, Dublin), Designist (George St, Dublin) and The Lifeline project (Dublin).

Key items discussed over the course of two hours were business sense and where that fits in creative courses in college, new ventures being part of and benefiting the local community, the importance of collaboration between college courses with one another and the community, the ability to follow through on goals with realistic planning and other topics. The discussion was opened to the floor, which consisted of approximately 50 students from DIT, NCAD and other colleges, for Q&A.

The festival itself was a great success and testament to the hard work of its organisers Ned Kaar and Ruth Hynes who showed great initiative in creating this worthwhile and important event.

Best Yet advertising competition 2011

I competed in the inaugural Best Yet advertising competition at the end of March in the Irish Times building on Tara Street, Dublin.

I teamed up with TBWA Art Director Keith Lawler for the day.

The client was Miller Genuine Draft (MGD). The brief was to create awareness of MGD on tap and put the product in the minds of 18-35 year old males for consideration when in the pub. "It's Miller Time" also returned as the campaign line. Here are the two concepts that got us a top 5 finish:

The key aspects Keith and I picked up on where that the target audience "don't want to feel as though they are missing out on anything, that they are getting the most out of life", MGD should be synonymous with these great times. Our first solution is an image of a man's hand holding a pint of MGD with wrist bands from gigs/events up to his elbow, stamps from nightclubs and events covering his hand along with some lucky ladies' phone numbers.

The other aspect we concentrated on was "the potential of a big night out" and again making MGD a part of these nights. For this we pictured the lads in the pub swapping stories about their fantastic 'Miller night' experiences. "Make It Happen" was the campaign line focusing on the sense of adventure, excitement and positive outgoing attitude of Miller and the target audience.

Overall it was a fantastic day, a great competition showing the strength and healthy future of advertising in Ireland.