Exploring everything UniSC design has to offer

Exploring everything UniSC design has to offer

Katrina Palmer’s photography mirrors her personality: full of energy. In her pictures, nothing and no one is still.   

"I’m the type of person who likes to be doing things," she talks quickly, but with an easy smile. "I need my brain to be active."  

Her portfolio is almost as diverse as her chosen field. She admits she wasn’t sure what area of design she wanted to get into when she enrolled at UniSC. But after 15 years as a pharmaceutical rep, including several national sales awards, she was ready to stop chasing the numbers and establish a creative career and a more enjoyable lifestyle. She settled on a visual communication major, and across four and half years of part-time study nurtured strong interests in photography, animation, brand design, and even dipped her toe in game design.   

"3D game art almost killed me," she says seriously. "But I was determined to learn."  

She’s the kind of designer who loves creativity for the sake of it, and who isn’t afraid to diversify.  

"I wanted to learn a lot of different skill sets," she says. "I want to be a designer who thinks, I want to create something, so how do I do it?"  

As well as collecting skills and experience, Katrina is bringing a strong art background into her new career.   

"Art is the only time I switch off. I get focused and nothing else matters. Hence why I thought getting into creativity would be a really good transition. There is this blurred line between art and design and photography, it all fits in the creative industry bucket."  

Her artistic side stands out in her work. One of her most memorable projects at UniSC is a life-size charcoal drawing, which she augmented with fairy lights to simulate glimmering rain and the sound of a girl laughing to create an interactive installation. Like her photography, the image radiates the feeling of movement.   

"That was one of the coolest things I’ve designed because I didn’t really know much about the technology and that was out of my league, but I learned," she says.   

All of Katrina’s work embodies her energy. In her second to last semester, she’s team leader on two major student design projects, one of which is hosting seminars and creating introductory graphics for extended reality company Haven XR, who are setting up a full-scale virtual reality studio on the UniSC. With so many different experiences under her belt, Katrina is finding design more intuitive, and is starting to feel ready to enter the workplace. True to her nature though, she looks at her impending graduation as another opportunity to keep learning.  

"I often think to myself, I’m in my final year and I still know nothing, and that’s because design is so diverse." She laughs. "I feel like I’m just scratching the surface."  

  
Writes Mathew Channer.
Photos: Courtesy of the designer.