Spotlight on our instructor

LCI Melbourne students love their Communication Design Coordinator Donna Kirkwood! Part of the reason for her popularity is that she gets results. She coached the 2016 final year Communication Design class to be shortlisted in the prestigious Big Idea International Advertising Association competition. 

Known for her distinctive fashion style and skyscraper heels, Donna started teaching Communication Design at LCI Melbourne in 2009. Her education background has been focussed on communication design, completing qualifications in Fine Art & Design, Bachelor of Arts (Graphic Design) and more recently a Master of Design Communication. Donna produces talented graduates and builds long-lasting professional relationships with them - all to the benefit of current students. Read about a recent excursion to meet alumni at M&C Saatchi.

Outside LCI Melbourne, Donna is a co-founder of the company ZOM8IE. The creative team restores, refashions and transforms time pieces from a bygone era, and are the creators behind the commemorative plaque unveiled at the opening of LCI Melbourne's new campus in the heritage-listed Foy & Gibson building (pictured above).

About the LCI Melbourne Plaque

A plaque was installed inside the campus entrance at 150 Oxford Street, Collingwood to mark the occasion of the launch of LCI Melbourne's new campus. The team behind ZOM8IE crafted a unique invention to suit all majors:

• Communication design: vintage light globe of ideas & cogs
• Fashion & costume: vintage bobbin winder & thread
• Visual arts: vintage printmaking tool
• Graphic & digital design: fuse elements before digital
• Filmmaking & photography: Cable release used with film
• Interior design: Vintage ruler
• Gauge: to detect pressure & stress levels of students in design
• Blacksmith rams head: old woollen mills in which the campus is located

About ZOM8IE 

When a Scholar of Horology (Time) and a Master of Communication (Graphic) combine forces they design with brains, resurrecting the dead with a combination of 8 found elements from the past to be utilised for the present. The inventors, Patrick Thomas O’Neill and Donna Kirkwood are the animated corpses that use a combination of techniques to: burn, flange, drill, mill, tap, thread, polish, strip, heat, solder, wire, coil, bend, turn, straighten, cut, rivet, remove, burnish, bush, calibrate, wind, regulate, tune, oxidize, attach, lacquer, paint, fumigate, sand and design their utilitarian industrial objects into a new life of form and function. They, like zombies are hypnotized by objects of a bygone era and hungry for mixed and diverse artefacts that make up our material culture. These ordinary tools, instruments, utensils, devices and machines are refashioned and transformed so that they assume new and important social and cultural functions. These new functions are far removed from each object’s original use in everyday life but their impairment leads to the resurrection of new industrial furnishings. Hidden within the intricate structure of each finely wrought piece is the symbol of perfection and the timeless infinite in the form of the numeral eight.