It is with deep sadness that we announce the death, yesterday (6 February 2024), of our dear friend and colleague Nuala Redmond – the Gazette’s designer. Nuala had been battling bravely with pancreatic cancer since her diagnosis last April.

Her career with the Gazette began in 1997 as its freelance designer at the invitation of then editor, Conal O’Boyle. Her impact was immediate, with the magazine taking an Irish Independent/Communicators in Business Award the same year. This was followed in 2001 with a PPAI award for ‘Customer Magazine of the Year’.

Creativity

From 2005, Nuala’s creativity and attention to detail played a major role in the Gazette’s many subsequent awards, including ‘Magazine of the Year’ (four times) and ‘Cover of the Year’ (three times), among many other successes.

Her greatest personal achievement was in winning ‘Designer of the Year 2017’ at the Irish Magazine Awards – when the magazine also took the award for best cover.

Nuala was creative to the core – always seeking to push the boundaries of great design, and utterly fearless when it came to defending her design concepts.

I speak for the entire Gazette team, and our other freelance designer colleagues, when I say that we already miss Nuala greatly. We miss her bossiness – she believed that the Gazette was her Gazette – a legacy of almost 27 years at the designer’s helm.

Unswerving loyalty

Nuala always wore her heart on her sleeve. If you made a friend in Nuala, you made a friend for life. Her loyalty was unswerving, her dedication nothing less than 100 per cent in everything she did – and woe betide anyone who did not deliver in equal measure!

She was adamant that, regardless of her failing health, she would not be defined by her illness. She insisted on designing the magazine right up to the current Jan/Feb issue, of which she designed approximately one-fifth before her ill-health got the better of her. She never said it, but we know it kept her sane through those ‘dark nights of the soul’ – and we were so happy to facilitate her in every way we could.

I wish to acknowledge the wonderful efforts and dedication of the entire Gazette team during this very difficult period. Each one has been an amazing colleague whose first wish was to assist Nuala to keep going for as long as possible – and to ease her burden when the time came for her to put away her keyboard just three short weeks ago. 

We are devastated by her loss – she is irreplaceable in so many ways. Yet Nuala’s design legacy will continue to live on in future evolutions of the magazine, which has her design concepts at its core.

We send our sincere condolences to her dear son Cian and partner Padraig Guilfoyle, to Nuala’s partner Peter Power, and her siblings Barry Redmond, Deirdre McNinch, Maeve Kelly, and Fiona Hoey.

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a h-anam dílis.