Seizing St. Patrick’s Day as a green-and-gold opportunity, we’ve been profiling a few Irish and Ireland-based Dribbblers over the last week.
We didn’t expect the surfing.
When we started this series, we hoped for lyrical odes and we got them. Many fit our cliched dreams of the Emerald Isle. Designers have praised Ireland’s green hills, cobbled streets, vibrant art and music scenes, and local pubs. Alan Geraghty, AKA Tiger Pixel, is the first to tout the waves.
"Galway’s a big college town so it has a real vitality to it all year round," he told Dribbble.
Energy. College students. We like it.
"It’s a great town for the lively arts, with a strong focus on music and theater. Many a poet wanders its cobbled streets."
We’ve heard that about the arts. We like the poet bit. Makes it more specific. Gives us something to look at in our mind’s eye.
"It’s also got some of the sweetest surf breaks in the country."
Wait, what? Now you’re smashing our stereotyped notions to bits!
Mad googling reveals that Ireland is in fact the new hot place to head for wave-catching. Irish surfer Ollie O’Flaherty bragged on Irish surfing to the BBC last April, after he was nominated for a Billabong XXL Big Wave Award.
"To be brutally honest the best waves I’ve ever seen or surfed have been in Ireland, by a long way. It might not be good all the time but when it is good, it’s better than anywhere else in the world," O’Flaherty said.
Like his surfing countryman, Geraghty’s got waves on the brain. Past work has appeared in the New York Times and The Guardian, but more recently he designed a logo for a new push notification platform called Element Wave. Element Software, Geraghty’s employer, will launch the platform in the next month.
"We wanted to avoid an oceanic vibe for the logo so I decided to go with a single sinusoidal wave. More of an emphasis on science than surf," he explained. "I think it’s pretty eye catching and is quite versatile for using with different colors. I used a blue metallic effect for the Dribbble shot to make it appear a little more vibrant."
"Eye-catching" and "vibrant" also apply to Macnas, a Galway-based troupe of artists that specializes in fantastical, processional spectacle. U2 fans might remember them from the band’s Zooropa tour. Geraghty had planned to catch the group’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. “It’s always a trippy experience,” he said.
Unfortunately, the group was elsewheres (plural: Limerick, Cork, Moscow, Sydney, Brisbane!), so Geraghty caught the city parade and met up with some college buddies by the Spanish Arch.
This has turned out to be quite the Renaissance interview: college town, wandering poets, cobbled streets, sweet surfing, sinusoidal waves, new products, shattered stereotypes, psychedelic Paddy’s parades, 16th century arch.
Anything else sir? What’s that? Add a “like all” button to Dribbble accounts? At least one, Geraghty suggests. Louie Mantia.
"The quality of his work is simply incredible and the comment sections for his shots are always amusing!"
Geraghty can be found online at cargocollective.com/tigerpixel and on Twitter, sporadically, @tigerpixel.
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