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Earlier this month The Irish Times published a great little guide to Sligo, in collaboration with Failte Ireland. Lots of times you read this type of thing and, as a local, don’t recognise the place you live, for good or bad reasons. This one was different though, Not only did I recognise the place they were describing, but it covered nearly all the best bits of Sligo that I include when I’m in my own tour guide mode with visiting pals. Lots of my Top 10 things to do in Sligo made an appearance, in one guise or another, but I see the Magic Road alluded them once again, it must be the magic….
The supplement, which you can download via the link below, or by clicking on the image up top, is a great reference guide, and would make an excellent pocket guide for any type of traveller. I was particularly thrilled to see so much culture and lifestyle entries; great foodie recommendations, culture summaries and a special focus on Sligo Music, which is in abundance in all forms in Sligo town and county, as a quick glance at sligomusic.ie will usually show you.
I think the publication was the first time, or one of the first times, that the new Sligo brand was used;“Sligo, Set your Spirit Free”. It’s a brand I really like, and I’m usually very critical of visual identities, especially the tag line. This one however, also seems to concur with the Sligo I know, a place that can set your spirit free in lots of ways; surfing, golfing, eating, listening to music, walking, visiting arts and culture events, or ancient historic sites, or just contemplating the landscape. The actual coloured text took me a few minutes to settle into, but it’s really grown on me. For some reason it immediately reminded me of Dakar’s photos of Sliglow (a project for Culture Night Sligo 2010), something in the free-flowing, yet painterly aspect of the font. It could reference anything from cave painting to street art and all that came in between, while still looking very natural and “of nature”. When I looked up the official line it said; “The brushstrokes are inspired by the paintings of Jack B Yeats, the vertical limestone features of the landscape and the crashing Atlantic waves.” which is even better; Sligo’s three big selling points; landscape. culture and water all rolled into one. Well done Zero G
Download the pdf: Sligo – Irish Times 6th July 2011
This great video popped up today with footage from the recent big wave/tow-in competition in Mullaghmore in Sligo. Filmed by a collective called Mulli Media their vimeo channel says there is a documentary in the pipe-line, which should be very promising if this taster is anything to go by. Sligo looks great and the waves look incredible.
If you want to read more about the competition, Ireland’s first tow-in invitational, there was an excellent piece in the Irish Times recently with some stunning photos by Roo McCrudden
Last year the Department of Tourism, Culture and Sport launched an excellent initiative in the Cultural Technology Grant Scheme. The idea was to match creativity in technology with the cultural sector, thus creating new ways to promote culture and the arts in Ireland. The first batch of resulting projects are starting to come to light, and revealing some very useful and clever products. I blogged about Breaking Tunes a few weeks back – a good looking phone app that delivers music event and artist info and content from emerging irish music artists direct to your phone, and now another great app has been launched today in the form of Dublin’s Cultural Trail courtesy of Temple Bar Cultural Trust and a trio of Digital Hub enterprises.
Both a comprehensive website, and a compatible iphone app, the Trail aims to bring a number of Dublin’s leading cultural institutions to life with lovely photographs of each venue, historical information and some extremely high quality videos. It’s clearly aimed at visitors to Dublin, bringing to life as it does all of the venues both from the website and the app, though locals should find it useful too.
Both website and app have handy venue info; opening times, contact details and location maps that will come in handy for even regular users of the locations. The app uses it’s geo-location potential to show the venues in respect of your current location, and can even map your journey to them via google maps.
The website offers a little more with an event listing service for the venues and a special offers section, two things that would have been nice to see on the app as a way to keep it dynamic and current, but possibly not everything would fit? Or maybe they are to come on an upgrade? The site also has a clever little weather summary in the header.
The videos are great, and it’s so encouraging to see such high quality, contemporary looking product being created to promote Dublin abroad. It’s easy to see how the site will be of huge benefit to those planning trips to Ireland and may entice those who are still undecided about their trip, if promoted in the right way. I loved seeing the inclusion of contemporary cultural venues like Project, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios and the Graphic Studio Gallery, as I have a bit of a bugbear about so much tourism being heritage related, but it’s a pity then to see all three of these venues videos lumped together into one combined video rather than a separate one for each of them as with the other venues like IMMA or Chester Beatty. It may arguably work to push visitors from one to the other within the Temple Bar trio, but it’s not clearly spelled out when you start the video that you’re about to see three venues, so I initially thought the wrong video had loaded on the app.
It’d be great to see the videos becoming sharable, (especially the intro trailer) and specifically embedable, but tying the links back to the dublin cultural trail site, so that bloggers and others could better share the info about the trail, and about the great venues. At the moment there aren’t unique url’s for each of the videos either so you can’t provide a hyperlink to their exact page, whatever about embedding them,
Overall though, it’s a great initiative, and the potential for it is huge, not least of all to see irish culture and technology come together so forcefully. It’s so brilliant to see these sorts of things finally coming out of Ireland and I’m looking forward to seeing the other projects funded by the scheme come on stream over the coming weeks.
