Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference 2009 is hosted by Queen's University Belfast, the Royal Irish Academy and Swansea University in partnership with the National Library of Wales.

We were delighted to be recommended for - and receive - the commission to design the conference branding.

As the theme of the conference is data, data preservation and digitisation, and the conference is a joint venture between Irish and Welsh institutions, we decided to digitise Ireland and Wales. Conference materials are proposed to consist of highly stylised geographical features based on average hue and luminosity values of uniformly distributed pixel clusters present in digital aerial photography. The main image (upper left) is of the Irish Sea, which acts as both a barrier (it is a body of water) and a link (it is traversible) between Ireland and Wales.

The images also reference data compression and degradation - large areas of land and sea, and the information contained within them, are condensed into a few simple rules for drawing coloured circles. While the resulting forms might still be (barely) recognisable, the quantity of data lost is significant, and the original maps cannot be recreated from the remaining information alone.

Images left to right: Irish Sea, with Belfast upper centre and Wales lower right; Swansea Bay and South Wales, with the Brecon Beacons visible lower centre as larger dark spots; Donegal and north-western Ireland - the white area is a result of cloud cover on the original aerial photograph; Gwynedd and Ynys Môn in north-west Wales - Snowdonia is visible as the darker central region, the Llŷn Peninsula is just visible towards the lower left corner.