Date created: February 2011

Web Address: www.turnofftheredlight.ie

About the Project: Turn Off the Red Light is a campaign to end prostitution and sex trafficking in Ireland. The campaign was set up by an alliance of NGOs and was coordinated by the Immigrant Council of Ireland.

I designed the identity for the campaign, and built the website through WordPress so that the campaign could manage their own updates and post regularly to a blog. I worked on the project with Colin Murphy of Polity, who provides media services and production.

Date created: January 2011

Web Address: www.petermatthews.ie

About the Project: I built this website for the very talented Peter Matthews, a Bray-based photographer.  The brief was to keep the site quite clean and minimalist, in order to make Peter’s beautiful photography the main focus.  The site was built through WordPress, and contains a slideshow gallery on the homepage.

Peter has an extremely impressive portfolio and cv – his work has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, USA Today and Newsweek.  He is also a personable and lovely individual, and would be a pleasure to have around at a wedding – I would very much recommend getting in touch with him if you are looking for a wedding photographer.

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.

Date created: November 2010

Web Address: www.mamanpoulet.com

About the Project: I recently created a custom WordPress theme for Maman Poulet, one of Ireland’s most popular and highly-regarded political blogs.  The site had previously been using a standard WordPress template, and Suzy of Maman Poulet wanted a new, cleaner and personalised look.

The chicken illustration is by minimil at iStockphoto.

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).

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