Renee Buckley

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Renee Buckley is the right side of the brain that is Propeller Global the award-winning graphic design and marketing company based in Brisbane, Australia. You may have already read about the left half in the Damien Buckley interview.

TXPQ What is life all about?

RB I’m not sure I know the complete answer to that one yet, but I guess for me so far it’s been about finding work that I really enjoy, spending plenty of time with family and friends and trying to make a small difference to the world through what we do, through charity and by trying to live the best life possible. (ugh, I sound like an episode of Oprah!)

TXPQ What motivates you or ‘makes you tick’?

RB When a new client comes along, I enjoy the process of taking their initial thoughts and ideas and coming up with a way to represent them visuallyI’ve always been a ‘creative type’, so having a job where I get paid to come up with creative ideas and artwork is very motivating. When a new client comes along, I enjoy the process of taking their initial thoughts and ideas and coming up with a way to represent them visually. I live very much in the right side of my brain (infuriating for left brain, technical people like Damien), so ideas for things tend to come very randomly – I can be looking at the colours in an image and an idea for a design concept will emerge. It’s not logical, but it seems to work!

TXPQ Would you like to say anything about living in Brisbane, favourite things or activities etc?

RB Brisbane is a great place to live. I think for years Brisbane always felt like the country cousin to cities like Sydney and Melbourne, but over the last decade it has really come into its own and has a really vibrant and energetic feel about it. As for favourite things or activities – I really love making glass beads – I have a blow torch in my garage and I sit out there in my spare time, melting glass into colourful little creations. It’s very therapeutic.

TXPQ How long have you and Damien lived together and worked together?

RB We seem to get on better now that we’re together almost 24/7, than we did beforeDamien and I have lived together for about 12 years and worked together for 4 years. For the first 8 years we had different jobs and were sometimes like ships that pass each other in the night. A lot of people surmised that we’d kill each other within 6 months of working together, but we seem to get on better now that we’re together almost 24/7, than we did before (well most of the time anyway!)

TXPQ Who’s the boss? ;-)

RB I’m going to give Damien the title of Grande Fromage!

TXPQ It can’t all be a bed of roses?

RB No, not always – there are times when we almost get a kind of cabin fever because we’re spending so much time in the house. Things tend to get a bit silly in the Propeller office then, but usually this resolves itself eventually without too much craziness.

TXPQ Are you the creative, artistic one and Damien the technical, nerdy one?

RB Oh yes – most definitely and whilst I do try to have a basic understanding of web development, once it gets into the intricacies of code my brain just refuses to take much of it in. I really admire what Damien (and all other web developers / coders) can do. I feel like I get to do the easy part in designing the look and feel of it and would love to understand how to make it work behind the scenes, but it’s probably best for everyone that I just stick to the artistic side of things! There are some amazing people who manage to do both the creative and technical parts of the job and I think this is really incredible, as each takes such a very different mind set.

TXPQ Working together obviously works well for you. So how do you do it? Do you have clear-cut roles – eg, do you do all the graphics for the web as well as for print?

RB Our skill sets fit really well together and enable us to come up with some good work for our clientsWe do have very clearly defined roles within the business, which works well for us. I do all the design work for both print and web, while Damien takes care of building the web sites and making the email marketing work. When we get a new web project, we work together on looking at the initial brief, to nut out how it will work, what functionalities it will need to have etc and then I produce the designs and hand them over to Damien to build. Our skill sets fit really well together and enable us to come up with some good work for our clients.

TXPQ Has your life changed at all and how have you been feeling since winning the McFarlane Prize?

RB We were both so surprised to win – the other finalists work was amazing, so we were thrilled just to be up there amongst them, but when we won we were gobsmacked! Since winning, I’ve just been thinking about how to improve my design work and have been working on ideas for our new website which is well and truly overdue for a re-do.

TXPQ Anything else you’d like to say about the business, or life, or the universe?

RB The lines are open and we’re waiting for your call.

Categories: Web Designer