Life at Queen’s

Before I begin, let's go back in time to the old Q logo...

…when I was a fresh-faced, young guy without a grey hair on my head, when I landed a secondment up in Queen’s in 2012. Working 3 days a week in the old ‘Marketing and Creative Services’ with a bunch of legends of Queen’s. It’s here where I found my love of graphic design for education and even photography. Since then, I have created A LOT.

Years at Queen's

Starting in June 2012 as a designer, I’m nearly part of the furniture here. A good bit of furniture, like a workbench. Something supportive that gets stuff done. Well.

Prospectuses

That’s all of the Undergrad, Postgrad and International prospectuses that I’ve worked on. Some of those even had mini guides and/or digital versions with embedded videos and galleries.

InDesign files later

Yeah, I checked. That’s a lot of posters, leaflets, 48 sheets, booklets, event banners, stage backdrops, digital publications, web pages, gif ads, social posts and PowerPoint templates. (As of 2022)

In the last 10 years there has been a full rebrand, digital transformation projects, website redesign and an evolution in general for the university, building on it’s reputation across the globe.

My job role has evolved too, along with my own set of skills. I am the designer and photographer for publications and campaigns. Each day can be very different from photographing the VC on the roof of the Main Site Tower, to flying a drone over the Lanyon, building props for campaign shoots, designing rooms in Cinema4D, creating a gazillion page publication and a billion leaflets, creating a thousand gif ads in one day, building wraps, billboards, signage and… You get the picture.

Here are a few of the big things I do. First up is my work child, The Prospectus.

In 2016, I completely redesigned the prospectus from the page size up. It has stayed the same format since, been up for awards in the Heist Education Awards, and now with the recent addition of the all-new digital prospectus, it is really a beast of a publication.

Read all about it here:

Another large part of my job is designing and creating campaigns with the team. These really are great fun to get stuck into. Sink the teeth into. Get the creative juices flowing, even having the team over to ‘Dan’s kitchen’ (my gaff) for the day for a creative session. I love how different these can be every time.

Explore more:

In truth, it is because of Queen’s that I found my love of photography. We had no in-house photographers employed at the university after a restructure of the department, yet I had to make the prospectus look new each time. I had a vision for each page overall, but I needed photos. So I plugged myself into the Matrix and started learning. Every day I would be on YouTube or Lynda.com learning everything I could until I could start taking things from my mind and making them a reality. I mean, it was more time to create and make things for myself. From there it has become a part of my day-to-day job from photographing students, to graduation, from front-facing campaign images used on billboards, to countless prospectus covers, to everyday life at Queen’s with students involved, to special guests like Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton or everyone involved with the Good Friday Agreement, the list goes on. Here are a load of things I have shot throughout my time at Queen’s.

Oh, did I mention I got my drone license? Did I also mention the below photograph was in the shortlist for Drone Photography in the British Photography Awards? It also won first place in Wex Photographic and Fotospeed’s photography competitions. It was re-shared by loads instagram accounts, like DiscoverNI and Tourism Northern Ireland. As well as being used on the front of our 2019 Undergraduate prospectus. I’ll be honest, it took a lot of planning and luck to get the sun in the exact place on a nice sunny morning. It was one of those eureka moments when I flew up and saw the shadows finally lining up perfectly.

There really is just so much that I have created in my time at Queen’s. It’s hard to condense Leaflets, brochures, digital templates, on-campus digital screen graphics, billboards, events, exhibitions… The list goes on. Here’s a bit of everything.