Web design in Leap for Leap Scarecrow Festival

A new web design in Leap, West Cork that needed a wicked web and graphic design collaboration with the community from Leap Village. I joined Leap Scarecrow Festival in 2016 making scarecrows and installations with a bunch of friends. The madness of creation gave shape to a full “Pandora box” from which we pulled out dragons, a time witch, spiders and  giant purple octopuses taking over food trucks. The charm went on and we made the leap from crafting to web and graphic design requested by the honoured Leap Scarecrow Festival Committee.

A poster and road sign design in Illustrator for the Leap Scarecrow Festival, followed next year by a WordPress website design dedicated both to the community of Leap and to the Leap Scarecrow Festival. The strategy being set that while the festival’s season is off, visitors of Leap can still find what the village has to offer all year round and where they can stay. Moreover, the local people would find who are the local artists, producers and services that they can connect with.

I designed the logo of Leap Village to be represented by a blooming fucshia flower, the delicate symbol of West Cork: “All along the roadways of the south-west of Ireland, on slender arching stalks the beautiful Fuchsia flowers colour the hedgerows from July to October with their rich hues.” www.wildflowersofireland.net. I also chose a squiggly typography hued in sap green representing the abundant vegetation of West Cork.

I tweaked the basic WordPress theme in PHP, CSS and HTML to render two different looks for the village and for the festival, playing with the colour palette and graphic design elements. As a result, the website portrays differently both Leap‘s history, heritage and venues and a thorough timeline of the festival’s editions from 2015 to present, with graphic headers, animations, schedules, image galleries, winner listings and stories, know hows, Irish halloween customs and local ghost stories.

The image archive was done with the help of people from Leap, trying to reconstruct the timeline as much as possible.

Thanking all for a unique, witchcrafted experience.

Graphic Design in Skibbereen for restaurant Riverside Cafe

A graphic design in Skibbereen project with a ‘design for print‘ collaboration for Riverside Cafe in Skibbereen, West Cork. The print design Skibbereen project included a creative graphic design for business cards, posters and leaflets for both summer and Christmas time.

I used as an inspiration their yummy delicious cakes savoured in their beautiful window corner on the right as you go inside the restaurant. I recreated it in Illustrator and sketched it with the Paint tool on graphic tablet. I was thinking that I can do a little icon with the whole building so I used the Shapes and the Pen Tool in Illustrator. Loved the outcome and the fact that you have a complete illustration of both the inside and the outside of the Riverside Cafe and Restaurant.

I chose white and turquoise for the main colour palette with flowy shapes to render the river impression and oranges for pop ups.

Looking back at the magic of that day for both myself and my friend Breeda, as inspiration bounced and flowed all around us. Coming down from David Seager’s ceramic exhibition in Uillinn Arts Center. Chatting our elated impressions, Breeda was making up lyrics on the way. We ended up meeting friends in the Cafe with everybody adding another line to her song. Have a listen to the musical result of that day and enjoy delightful musical expriences at breedamurphy.com!

Graphic Design In Cork for jewellery business Magpie Gems

What a beautiful surprise to collaborate with a sister national. One Sunday I get this call from Mallow and as I was listening to her voice, I couldn’t understand what she was saying, expecting English, I was baffled to listen and lavish in my own Romanian language.

Lavinia is an amazing jewellery crafter, playing with silver sterling and Swarovski crystals, and, as a result, her products are purely outstanding and sparkling. She created the brand so pretty called Magpie Gems and as it goes: one is for the color, two for the joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven gems always to hold, eight for a wish, 9 for a kiss, 10 for a jewelry you must not miss. That’s truly sweet.

For her graphic design In Cork project For Lavinia needed a strong branding and key visual graphics for print: logo, packaging design, business card, thank you card, tags, flyer, poster, and invoice design.

In the meantime, you can check her masterpieces here.

Web design in Kinsale for massage therapy business

Every time I have a new web design project, I get to meet new people, learn different approaches and launch these dreams online for others to meet and share. Triona O’Sullivan is an exceptional acupuncturist and massage therapist, having her cabinet set in Kinsale, Cork. For this web design in Kinsale project, Triona needed to set up a website with a control management system and responsive on all devices. Checked, checked, checked!

She also didn’t want a classic website with “a click on that and go view the info in another page”, she wanted a system to display everything on one page with sections revealing as you scroll down. Triona chose the A Master Page Website Plan with content split in a sequence of visual branded sections. A handy side little menu accompanies the scrolling, jumping from one segment to another. The website’s divisons included info about her practice, services, photo gallery, contact details, and testimonials. Each section needed to echo the branding visual of the dragon as a symbol of the Chinese medicinal practice, and displaying the contact details.

At the end of our collaboration, we happily launched this baby weby: www.trionaosullivan.ie

Web Design in Cork for Nutrition and Wellness business

web graphic design cork

Met Elaine in a cute coffee shop in Cork and as she was telling her dream, I was thinking what a fabulous project to work for. She told me how she wanted to work for the health benefit of people, how to coach them to reach a greater state of wellbeing with a holistic approach to wellness, what would be the four pillars of a good health, and as she was counting them, I was thinking: “Uh, I’m bad at that! Really need help at that! What about cakes and cookie?”. But her motivational energy and great looks proved that I can go that way too.

For this web design in Cork project, Elaine needed a branding, a website, and an introductory video. We joined forces and established a really good looking visual for her business, designing the logo in such a way to express the four pillars of a good health: 1. Eat Well, 2. Move More, 3. Sleep Essentials, 4. Stress Management. Each pillar had its own graphic, representing the action. After the logo, color scheme and voice was set, I finished also the business card and then proceeded to set up the website. This was done on a reliable WordPress platform with the content management system and responsiveness on all media, connecting it to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google + and Youtube. I’ve also set up the search engine optimization functionality and set it up in Google Business. I really loved the end result, the looks are invigorating and motivational.

Elaine also called a cool videographer for her introductory video to be displayed on Youtube. And I finished up the looks in After Effects setting a video front and back design.

You can view the project here www.corknutritionandwellness.ie

Logo design in Skibbereen for food truck Brotherly Grub

The Ryan brothers bought a food truck to bring to life their dream of serving healthy, tasty, locally-sourced food, with seaweed and plants foraged from the local bays and West Cork area. A very fun project for which I created the food truck logo and designing a concept for the van itself.    

I drew the logo in a brushed heart shape to represent the ‘Hearty Grub Served with Love’ ethos and the warm feelings shared with every tray of food. The food truck logo design was vectorised and finished in Illustrator. As for the colour and the design direction of the van, I ran different colour options of the van through Photoshop in order to get a better perspective of the final result.