Creative Advertising graduate designed website for The Queen's 80th birthday party
An opportunity to design a website for the ‘Children’s Party at the Palace’ event, celebrating the 80th birthday of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, was a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity for Paul Mulraney, a graduate of University College Falmouth’s MA in Creative Advertising.
The Children’s Party at the Palace took place in the gardens of Buckingham Palace on 25 June 2006, just three weeks after Her Majesty had visited the College’s Tremough Campus in Penryn as part of her 80th birthday anniversary tour. In a unique and extraordinary celebration of British children’s literature, characters from British children’s stories came together with authors, celebrities and children from all around the UK (chosen by ballot) to celebrate The Queen’s birthday.
Paul was responsible for the design, construction and animation featured within the site. The Flash version of the website contains an online book, with pages that can be ‘flipped’ to give the feel of a physical book and traditional storytelling. The format dovetailed with one of the key themes of the overall event: the creation of a long-term legacy designed to encourage children to read for pleasure.
The site had to meet a myriad of requirements: it had to provide clear yet vibrant information about the day; information about the series of charitable outreach events and programmes that were organised around the event; recognition of the event’s supporters and most importantly, entertain the under 10s.
“I’d been designing and building Flash websites with an emphasis on seamless animation combined with dynamic content,” explained Paul. The client needed to develop a fun and magical site while still offering ‘updateability’, so the project was a good match for my skills.”
“This site is just one of a number of projects I’ve created or managed where Flash has been crucial to the design. The ability to take creative and technical skills and make them work across any media (web, mobile, games, CD ROM, live action, animation) liberates a designer from ‘typecasting’ and offers a wider range of work opportunities. With video starting to come to the fore online, new combinations of media are emerging which blur the boundaries between the old definitions, and it’s these areas that I’m most interested in.”
While designing websites may seem a world away from advertising, Paul categorically stated that this simply isn’t the case. He said: “Falmouth’s Creative Advertising course helped me to develop awareness of not only the discipline behind advertising, but also, and of more importance to my subsequent career, the confidence to develop and apply marketable ideas across a broad range of media with consistency and clarity.”
“The ability to generate, develop and communicate ideas in a ‘campaign-like’ or ‘cross-media’ way still underpins most of my working practice,” Paul emphasised. “The Course tutors’ good advice and shared experience were critical in helping to kick-start my career in this competitive and fast-evolving industry.”
To see the Children’s Party at the Palace, visit
www.childrenspartyatthepalace.com
For further information about University College Falmouth’s Creative Advertising MA course, please visit
http://www.falmouth.ac.uk/creativeadvertising ,
email admissions@falmouth.ac.uk or contact Admissions on 01326 213852.
Ends
For further information about this press release, please contact Jilly Easterby, Head of Public Affairs, University College Falmouth, Woodlane, Falmouth, Cornwall TR11 4RH, Telephone: 01326 213792 oremail: jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk
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