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.

I have written a basic guide to using WordPress for site editors, which you can download and use. If you are a designer, you may find it useful to share with your clients.

About this guide

I ♥ WordPress.

I use it for nearly everything now, and am delighted that its scope will be expanded with version 3, which is due out in the not-too-distant future.

One of the strengths of WordPress is how user-friendly it is.  Clients of mine who are not particularly tech-savvy are using it and blogging and editing away.  Once they know the basics, I find that they rarely come back with problems.  However, the basics are sometimes tricky to find all in one place.  WordPress.org’s documentation is comprehensive and excellent, but is aimed more at the expert/administrator/developer level and there isn’t much basic info there for people who simply want to post and edit their content.

I’ve created a Guide to WordPress 2.9 for Editors, which I send to clients once their WordPress site is set up.  I’m sharing it here as I think it might be useful to other designers.  It just runs through the basic functions of adding a new post or page, editing posts and pages, adding and editing links, and managing comments.  It also includes a brief introduction to WordPress and explains the difference between categories and tags.  It’s a short (five page) pdf that can be saved and used as a reference.

So feel free to download and share this document. I just ask that you leave my credit on the footer, and that you comment below with your feedback if you have a spare minute.  Do you think the document is useful?  Any ommissions or errors?