Her job today is to inject more life into an animated cow. She does sit at a desk in front of a PC, a phone and a keyboard, but it's not an office job in the traditional sense. Yolanda Kennedy is at her desk by 9.30 a.m. puzzling over the hapless expression of a large moo-cow. She wants this cartoon cow to make a series of funny faces - to smile, to frown, to cry and to grimace. You, esteemed reader, can access this cow on the Internet at www.justmoo.com , which is a voice-over database for actors. "Want a voice, just moo," urges the website. Such is the life of a website designer. It can go from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the challenging to the erudite, from the worthy to the literary. Each day Kennedy wrestles with text, photographs, information, animation, concepts, themes and databases, and aims at transforming them into exciting packages which will be accessible to people at the click of a mouse on the Internet.
Websites can be very different in style, she says. Her job is to make websites as fresh, creative and exciting as possible. She needs to be artistic, creative, zany, colourful and new. Graphic design is an integral part of her work.
She uses colourful flash animation and hypertext mark-up language to create the greatest impact. Her job as a "new media developer" for Resonance Ltd, the communications consultancy where she works, involves working on a flat image on a screen and building it up to make it dynamic and much more forceful. As she works out the ideas and the changes, there's "still scribbling on bits of paper", she says. Her job calls for a mix of creative and technical skills. "We work on paper and on screen with a flat image and then figure out how to build it. You have to create it and make it much more imaginative and dynamic. Most of what we do is on the screen but it starts just as a flat piece and then you develop that."
Some of the websites designed to date by Resonance include the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art and justmoo.com. Those who go to this site can hear the voices of actors who are available for voice-overs. In general, the aim is to design a website that is "functional and usable for people as opposed to just an advertisement. There are a lot of websites out there," she adds.
"You're always learning something new in it," she says of her job, which she started at the end of last year. Before that she taught for a number of months in the Irish Academy of Computer Training on St Stephen's Green. Last year she completed a master's degree in multimedia systems, which followed on from her primary honours BA in politics.
After second level at Santa Maria College in Dublin's Ballyroan, where she did her Leaving Certificate exam in 1994, she was headed for journalism, perhaps. She got involved in working as arts editor for Trinity News and editing Alternate, an arts and culture magazine. It was through her editorial and lay-out work on two different college newspapers that her interest in web design began. She was still a student at Trinity College Dublin. The more she did, the more she enjoyed the work. The bug bit and she's been hooked ever since. "The more I learned about desktop publishing, the more I got interested. I think journalism was my original idea."
For those who want to find out more about Kennedy's work, check out her company's own web-site at www.resonance.ie.
