Click the image above to see a selection of spreads from Oxfam Action, or download a pdf of the entire issue here

Date created: Spring 2011

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/about/oxfam-action/

About the Project: Issue 2 of Oxfam Ireland’s magazine for supporters.  I did the complete layout and design for this issue, and also wrote a number of the articles.

Click the image above to see a selection of spreads from Oxfam Action, or download a pdf of the entire issue here

Date created: Autum 2010

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/about/oxfam-action/

About the Project: For years, Oxfam Ireland had three separate publications for our supporters: Oxfam Reports, for donors; Campaigner, for, well, campaigners; and The Engine Room, for volunteers. Our Marketing and Communications department led the initiative this year to combine all these publications into one single magazine, to save on costs and to try to move away from the tendency to segment our supporters.

I coordinated this project and led on the design and content of the new magazine. I have worked on magazine design before, but this was my first project where I was required to conceptualise and design one from scratch. It was a very interesting and challenging process, and I owe big thanks to magazine expert James Kelleher who gave me a lot of useful advice and feedback.

Issue 1 of Oxfam Action was circulated to Oxfam supporters and our shops in October 2010. The magazine contained a survey to gather feedback, and the response was overwhelmingly positive – 88% of respondents rated the magazine’s design and content highly.  Issue 2 will be published in February 2011; you can sign up to receive it on the Oxfam Ireland website.

Click the image for some large screengrabs of the new website.

Date created: May 2010

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org

About the Project: In the spring of 2010, I redesigned and rebuilt Oxfam Ireland’s main organisational website, www.oxfamireland.org. The objectives of the redesign were to:

• Improve and modernise the look of the site
• Install a CMS for updating content
• Add tags and categories to cross-link content
• Clean up the homepage, make Oxfam’s organisational priorities clear
• Simplify the content
• Encourage the users to explore the site with interesting content snippets
• Improve search engine optimisation with fresh content

I researched a number of CMS options, and in the end came back to good old WordPress.  The excellent WordPress MU system allowed me to set up a WordPress installation with multiple blogs (a feature that is now available in WordPress 3.0).

WordPress MU is good deal more challenging than WordPress, as there is less online support available, and I found that I had to hack, slash and burn my way through templates, code and plugins in order to get everything working.  I’ve done lots of WordPress customisation before, but this was the most complex one yet. It was very satisfying -  I learned a lot and ended up with a really nice CMS that has lots of excellent features. Updating is so much quicker than it was before, and best of all, content is output in a really useful, flexible way.  Our feeds are going to other sites and social networks without any duplication of work.

Some of the plugins that I used and found invaluable were:

• Sitewide feed – creates a feed of all posts from the multiple blogs. Tricky to get working as the plugin is no longer supported – there’s probably a better solution in WordPress 3.
• WP Menu Manager – creates custom menus without coding, handy if you need other people to be able to add pages
• WordPress Mobile Edition – creates a very well designed mobile version of your site
• Redirection – sets up and manages really quick 301 redirects. Crucial if you are redesigning an existing site and are changing page addresses
• Latest Posts by Category Archive – this plugin enables you to show latest posts in a single category on a page.  Really handy for a site such as Oxfamireland.org – I can now automatically feed the climate change news to the climate change campaigns page, for example.
• Mass Page Maker – also a lifesaver.  WordPress is great for many things, but creating or duplicating lots of pages is not its strength. This plugin allowed me to create our 50+ shop pages all in one go, and much more.
• CMS – this plugin makes handy adjustments to the WordPress backend, allowing the administrator to drag-and-drop pages, and add multiple content blocks to pages.

Click the image to see a slideshow of materials from the Haiti Lives exhibition

Date created: June 2010

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/haiti-lives

About the Project: Haiti Lives is a photography exhibition that was organised by Oxfam, to show the recovery work that Oxfam is carrying out in Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of January 2010. The exhibition featured 30 beautiful, inspiring images taken by photojournalist Ami Vitale, Jane Beesley of Oxfam and Jorge Silva of Reuters, and was on display in Dublin’s Powerscourt Townhouse Centre for the month of July.

I was in charge of designing the identity and all materials for the exhibition, and preparing the photographs for print and display.  Materials included a brochure, a poster, exhibition display graphics, the photo captions, large form prints for the windows of the exhibition and giant round 4m² displays for the Powerscourt Centre.

The exhibition’s run in Dublin was extremely successful, attracting a large number of visitors and garnering very positive press coverage, including a feature on RTE News.  You can see the photographs that appeared in the exhibition on the Oxfam Ireland website.

Date created: May 2010

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/shop/oxfam-donation-days/

About the Project: Attracting a sufficient number of good quality donations is always a challenge for Oxfam, and Ireland’s recent economic downturn has made this even more difficult. Many of our shops were in urgent need of stock, and so the Donation Day project was devised.

Four Oxfam shops around the country were picked to host the Donation Day events – a day of music, fun, treats and celebrity visits.  The events attracted a great deal of excellent media coverage, and over 400 new bags of stock were donated.

I created the posters and banners that were used to promote the events.  The brief was to create something fun and light-hearted, encouraging people to come down and get to know their local Oxfam shop staff, as well as bringing down their unwanted clothes, books and homeware.  I used a mix of stock images (tying this campaign into our ClearURGear campaign) and hand-drawn type.

Watch out for a Donation Day in your local Oxfam shop, and of course, any time is good for a spring clean – Oxfam is always happy to accept your quality unwanted goods.

Date created: From May 2010

Web Address: www.oxfamirelandshop.com

About the Project: The press team at Oxfam had the idea of redesigning our Fair Trade product press releases, which were previously just Word documents with no particular design, to make them more attractive. We regularly send out releases for our extremely wide and eclectic range of products, and have started displaying them in a magazine-spread style layout in the hope that they will catch the receiving editor’s eye. It’s had some good success: we’ve had lots of positive feedback and Oxfam’s Fair Trade products have been featured in a huge range of lifestyle spreads in magazines and supplements, such as the Sunday Independent, Prudence Magazine and Kiss Magazine.

Click the image for close-ups of the bookmarks

Date created: April 2010

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/shop

About the Project: Every year, Oxfam prints our own charity Christmas cards, and the offcuts from the printing run are used for a variety of purposes. This year, our retail managers asked me to do some bookmarks that would encourage donations to our shops .  I designed a set of three, each with a retro design theme and text that aims to remind people that there are plenty of goods that Oxfam shops are delighted to accept and sell on.

Date created: February 2010

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/schools

About the Project: The Oxfam schools website is a resource aimed at providing teachers and students with more information about the work that Oxfam does.  It shows the variety of ways that schools can get involved: by fundraising, participating in Oxjam, campaigning, insisting on Fairtrade products in the staffroom and much, much more.

• Sign Oxfam Ireland’s petition calling on the Irish government to ensure a fair deal at the UN global climate change negotiations at Copenhagen this December.
• Donate. The world’s poorest people are the ones most directly affected by climate change.
• If you have a blog, you can write about Climate Change for Blog Action Day too.  Full details at www.blogactionday.org
• This is a design site, and I’ll repeat the call I made to designers on Blog Action Day 08: think about volunteering some of your talents and time to a charity or campaigning organisation.   A strong image may only take you a few hours to produce, but a non-profit can get years of value from it.

Date created: May 2009

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/clearurgear

About the Project: Brand new website for the ClearURGear project. The awesome posters were done by Hunter Design, I can’t get over what a great, fun, colourful redesign of the brand it is.

I put together this simple minisite to provide information about the campaign, and to promote its new look.

Oxfam shops are seeing a welcome increase in custom, but because of this, they are running low on donated stock to sell. If you have good quality homewares, books, music, clothes or accessories that you don’t use any longer, now’s a great time to do a clear-out and bring them to an Oxfam shop.

Date created: April 2009

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/drc

About the Project: Noted fashion and portrait photographer Rankin travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo with Oxfam in 2008, where he photographed residents of refugee camps in the northern Kivu province.

These photos can currently be viewed by the public in a unique outdoor exhibition in Wolfe Tone Park, beside the Jervis Centre in Dublin 1.  The exhibition will run until Friday 31st July 2009, and is part of a fundraising appeal for the people of the DR Congo.

Date created: March 2009

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/oxfamvintage

About the Project:  This was one of those responsive jobs for Oxfam – I have a million billion other things to do, but Oxfamvintage is currently getting a lot of coverage and the shop page became one of the most visited pages on our site, so I thought it needed a bit more than just a very basic information page.  I did the design above based on a kind of mood board/scrapbook, and am really happy with how it turned out.

Date created: November 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamhome.org

About the Project: A simple minisite for the Oxfamhome furniture shops. I used WordPress to set this up so that the shop staff and volunteers can update it themselves.

Date created: November 2008

About the Project: These posters were created to raise awareness for World AIDS Day (Dec 1st) and to encourage people to show support by wearing a red ribbon. They were printed in A2 and A3 size and displayed in Oxfam shops around the country

Date created: November 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/ecards

About the Project: I’ve just updated our ecard site with some free seasonal cards. Why not go green this year, and send virtual cards? And you can always make a donation to Oxfam instead…

The programming of our ecard site was kindly done on a volunteer basis by Juan of Instinct.ie.

Date created: November 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/oxjam

About the Project: We’ve started a Heroes of Oxjam series on our Oxjam website, to thank all the great musicians and organisers who did such a fantastic job this year.  If you were involved in Oxjam, keep an eye on the site; you may be one of our prize winners.

The superhero illustration is adapted from an istock image.

Date created: October 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/christmas

About the Project: Each year I create a Christmas minisite for Oxfam Ireland; it brings all our Christmas products and content together, and shows shoppers that they can do all or most of their Christmas shopping with Oxfam.

I’m the Web Co-ordinator and Graphic Designer for Oxfam Ireland, as you’ll know if you follow this blog. There can sometimes, for me, be a disconnect between the work I’m doing and the work that we do. Sometimes it’s hard to connect sitting at a pc drawing colourful starbursts for Oxjam with our partner programs doing HIV testing in Uganda, or buying school bags for children in Tanzania. It’s also hard to talk about it without sounding sanctimonious, as though I’m praising myself for the great work that is done by our organisation, when in fact nothing could be further from my mind. I get to spend most of my working week being creative and learning new things, and the job is so incredibly rewarding: I feel very lucky to be here.

So when thinking about how to blog about poverty for Blog Action Day, I decided to briefly cover just two things:

How Little It Takes To Help

It only costs €18 to buy a set of schoolbooks for a child in a developing country. €18! That’s about four pints. (Note to self: try to stop always using pints as main unit for measuring cost.  It looks bad.) We all know that education is the key to breaking the cycle of poverty. Small contributions can change lives; don’t be put off donating because you feel that you can’t donate very much.

Why You Should Volunteer To Design For A Charity

Anyone who works in or cares about design knows the power of a strong photograph, a compelling poster campaign, a striking slogan. Charities often struggle to find the budgets for design work, and are endlessly competing for attention with consumer advertising. If you can donate a few hours of your time to design something for a charity, it could provide the charity with a cohesive identity for a project, and potentially be used in lots of materials. If you’re a photographer, a high quality photograph can make a huge difference in mailouts and press (photography, particularly, is so important to charities). Check out Volunteering Ireland’s arts and culture / office-based work sections or contact your favoured small charity and offer your services. People often associate volunteering with a regular weekly commitment, but a one-off or infrequent donation of skills can be really valuable as well.

Oxjam blogs for Blog Action Day »

Irish bloggers on Blog Action Day »

Date created: October 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/oxjam

About the Project: I put this flyer together this morning for my colleague Pip’s Oxjam fundraiser. It’s a very quick and simple job, but I love the colour combination of black, white and aqua, and may try to use it for another project soon.

iPod photo from www.sxc.hu

Date created: Spring 2008

About the Project: Every year Oxfam Ireland prints about a billion Christmas cards, and our printers allow us to use the offcuts from these cards for other projects. This year we used them to print off little handouts for Oxjam; they’re business card-sized and can be filled in on the reverse with details of gigs. I’m really pleased with how they turned out, the colours are really vibrant and I ended up using the artwork in lots of other Oxjam projects.

Date created: September 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org

About the Project: I’ve just redesigned the Oxfamireland.org homepage – I’d always felt that the original page was too cluttered, and usability research indicated that it needed less content and more clearly marked hierarchies.  I’ve changed it to a tabbed layout so that users can switch between categories of content, and have tried to use more colours and images.

I’ve also implemented other improvements across the site:

• wider layout
• larger font
• global header, linking to all of our main sites
• utilities menu on the footer
• seo-friendly filenames
• improved print stylesheet

I designed this voucher for Oxfam which was handed out at the Festival of World Cultures. It’s perforated; one half promotes a competition and the other has a ‘€10 off’ voucher for our Fair Trade Shops. The reverse (photo below) has the competition entry form and a map showing the location of our Dublin Fair Trade Shop.

Date created: Summer 2007

About the Project: I created a shed-load of large print materials for Oxfam last summer, for use at outdoor events. The above are large vinyl banners showing our logo and a welcome message, and our logo and the url of our website. The photos were taken at this year’s Electric Picnic; see our Flickr stream for more.

Date created: Summer 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/oxjam

About the Project: I’ve just been working on a major redesign of our Oxjam site. I needed something a bit more dynamic than the flat html we used last year – our Oxjam Officer will be blogging and I also wanted to add some content-rich features like a gig calendar and a google map. So I set it up through lovely old trusty old WordPress. Having said that, WordPress did give me some rare trouble this time, but we won’t be falling out over such a small snafu.

I went plugin loopy for this installation, and found some really great addons out there. Big thanks to the geniuses who created the Event Calendar, the Contact Form 7 and MyPageOrder in particular; you’ve made my life a lot easier.

Date created: April 2007

Web Address: eoxfam.ning.com (however, this is a private network and is only open to Oxfam staff)

About the Project: I set up this custom social network with two of my international Oxfam colleagues to create an online meeting and discussion space for Oxfam staff who work in multimedia and ecampaigning. Ning.com allows you to set up and customise your social network for free, and is one of the most user-friendly web apps I’ve ever used; it takes about five minutes to get set up.

Date created: Summer 2007

About the Project: This was a postcard for an Oxfam Ireland competition at the Festival of World Cultures in 2007.

Date created: May 2008

Web Address: Download a pdf of the newsletter here.

About the Project: Issue 4 of Oxfam Ireland’s newsletter for volunteers.

Date created: August 2007

About the Project: A3 size full-colour posters created for a Stop EPAs coalition. The same poster was used by various different organisations such as Trocaire and Comhlamh.

Date created: Jan – Mar 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/passthepresent

About the Project: Children who participate in Pass the Present receive a birthday pack from Oxfam, including a Puzzle Pack with activities and games. I laid out and designed all 8 Puzzle Packs (from ages 4-11 inclusive), which amounted to a hefty 32 pages of activities. It was such an enjoyable project though, I had so much fun with bright colours, patterns and cute animals. The image above links to a pdf with some sample pages from the packs. The birthday pack also contains a certificate and other goodies.

Date created: April 2008

About the Project: A simple poster for the Oxfam shops, featuring a beautiful image taken by Michael Kelly.

Date created: April 2007

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/clearurmusic

About the Project: Here’s our ClearURMusic Month poster – big thanks to Sleeveface.com for their help with this project. I’m currently very keen on posters that feature a big striking photo and just a simple black footer, there’ll probably be a few more produced in this style.

Date created: March 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/sleeveface

About the Project: For a brief few shining weeks in March, I was the official Sleeveface™ photographer of Oxfam Ireland, and yea verily, I was quite good at it. Some of these pictures are photos that I took to illustrate the concept of Sleeveface™ for our ClearURMusic Month competition, and some are photos that I took at a booth we set up at a DJ Shadow gig in the Amabassador. All the records pictured are from Oxfam shops, which are the best ever source of eclectic vinyl, believe me. Big thanks to Sleeveface.com for their help with the project.

These images are used in a not-for-profit capacity, but if any copyright holders are unhappy with them appearing here, please email me and I’ll remove them immediately: hello [at] jeanobrien.com.

Date created: February 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/passthepresent

About the Project: This leaflet was created to promote the Pass the Present project. It’s a full-colour 4DL leaflet with a detachable slip, and the artwork was created in InDesign.  Click the image to open the full PDF.

Date created: April 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/oxfambridal

About the Project: I designed and built this new minisite for the Oxfambridal range. The Oxfambridal shop is located in the Oxfam shop in Georges St, Dublin 2, and sells donated wedding dresses, many of which are brand new and have been donated by designers.

Date created: February 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/whatyoucando/volunteer

Click the image above for the pdf

About the Project: Designing a form doesn’t allow for much in the way of creativity, but I’m fairly pleased with how this one turned out – it’s legible and ordered while having a few nice design elements. Also photocopies well, which is important for the Oxfam shops.

Date created: February 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/passthepresent

About the Project: Children who participate in Oxfam’s Pass the Present project receive a pack from Oxfam, including this certificate of thanks.

Date created: March 2008

About the Project: I laid out and drew the illustrations for this invitation in Illustrator (with some drawing done in Flash).

Date created: January/February 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/passthepresent

About the Project: An a3 poster for the Pass the Present project. The poster will be displayed in Oxfam’s shops.

Date created: February 2008

Web Address: www.oxfamireland.org/passthepresent

About the Project: I created this mini-site for the Pass the Present project – an extremely nifty initiative dreamed up by an Oxfam volunteer. See the site for full details on how the project works – it’s of particular interest if you’re a parent, or have friends and family with kids. I’ve also created a large number of print materials for this project.

Date created: February 2008

About the Project: A2 poster created to promote Fair Trade in Oxfam’s shops.