Responses by Keelin Coyle, designer.

Background: Map Irish Design aims to plot the journey that Irish communication design has traveled since the foundation of the 100 Archive, a platform for design in Ireland founded in 2012. With the help of the Creative Ireland Programme, we have examined the submitted projects and the information associated with them to build a picture of design in Ireland: who makes it, where, with whom and why. By using design as a lens, we begin to see how Irish design has influenced commerce, culture and society both here and internationally; we also learn how business in Ireland continues to change, which social movements we care about and how we express ourselves creatively and culturally.

Through this project, we hope to demonstrate design’s far-reaching impact on life, culture, business and society. We also want to begin a conversation about the future of our industry, both within the industry itself and far beyond it—only by knowing where we have been can we start to imagine where we might go. For more information on the project, see our Map Irish Design overview video, and to find out about 100 Archive, view the informative animation by Studio9.

Favorite details: We are proud of the animated aspect of the site—it responds with intuitive and encouraging animations that aid the reader in exploring the dense body of information. The animated approach to loading times and infographics and statistics encourage intuitive scrolling and engagement with the site content.

Challenges: As a multidisciplinary project led by a multidisciplinary team, research, design and strategic thinking occurred simultaneously. We worked collaboratively to develop all aspects of the project together. While this provided wonderful, insightful building blocks for the site, it also proved challenging. Project researcher Elaine McDevitt had a mountain of data to collect, digest and collate, and her work continued through to the final stages of the project. In turn, throughout the design phase, final content for the campaign and microsite was broadly speculative. To manage this, we worked as a team to identify types of potential content and form a basis for the digital framework and tackle the issue at hand.

Time constraints: The project deadline became a moving target, and although the project designer created the overall brand and initial site design, due to shifting timelines the production phase of the project was completed with additional design by Detail. Design Studio and the developer James Delaney. Although far from ideal, this did allow the final solution to become more rich and successful in many nuanced ways.

Navigation structure: The aim was to communicate the research findings in an editorial approach, presenting the information via multiple outputs: articles, images, animations and infographics. This was a key focus in the design of the navigation structure, it had to be as easy as possible to browse the project findings in its multiple visual and written outputs.