Graduate Show 2023

 Announcing our end -of-year Graduate Show, which is at the Fruitmarket and runs from June 3rd till the 11th this year - more than a whole week's worth of amazing art & design to come and see across our 8 HN courses and the new BA (Hons) in Visual Communication.  We'll be releasing details of the private view and other one-off events during the exhibition week.  More info at the Fruitmarket website.

Typecast Posters

For their typography project this year the HNC worked in pairs on a project called 'Typecast'. We put a set of 12 names in a hat - 6 typographers and 6 typeface designers. Each pair of students picked one out, and then were tasked with explooring their subject and then creating two A2 posters in celebration of their chosen designer. 

The typographers were : Neville Brody, April Greiman, Reid Miles, George Olden, Paula Scher and Wolfgang Weingart. 

The typeface designers were : Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger, Herb Lubalin, Bruno Maag, Erik Spiekermann, Carol Twombly. 

Once this project was completetd we exhibited in the new BA Studio as part of our annual Mentor Night - where our industry mentors gather to kick off the mentoring programme each year. Designers love type and obviously they loved these posters.  

The font used for the Typecast  name was also designed by a former student Terry Smith, who is now Senior Porudct Designer at Dyson in Bristol and a long-standing mentor, and the A2s were printed on 180gsm matte paper at Edinburgh Copyshop.

Creative Edinburgh Awards

An integral part of our new BA (Hons ) programme is that our students are organsied into discrete teams and work on a range of live projects throiughout the year. One project that came in was to design and create a set of 10 awards for the Creative Edinburgh Awards Tenth Anniversary this year.

The Awards celebrate the city's creative community, highlighting the projects, people and places that flourish across Edinburgh and continually ensuring its place on the cultural map, nationally and internationally. Check out the winners here.

Each of the awards represents a category and our students took each category as a theme and devised a set designs laser-etched into 7X7" bamboo plates. Its always great to get a real hands-on proejct and this brief combined illustration, typography and product design. Here are the results:

D&AD New Blood winner

HND student Ellie Chalmers recently won a D&AD for her take on the Walkers Crisps brief.  Ellie's concept of 'open up' cleverly captured the essence of the breif, to get younger men talking about their emotions and mental health issues.  Ellie is amongst the 181 winners this year, from many 1000's of entries, and this is the our 10th D&AD for Vis Comm since 2010, not a bad success rate.  You can check out some of Ellie's work below and the full project here - D&AD New Blood.  

Next year Ellie is progressing onto our new BA (Hons) year (in conjunction with Kingston University London), which will see 21 HN studnets from across Graphics, User Experience and Illustration work towards a brand new degree qualification focussed on Industry, Collaboration and creative excellence.

End-Of-Year Show 2022

Mentor Quotes

Today we are revisiting a charming and insightful project by 2015 graduate Kiera Winfield, who collated a series of quotes about the course from our industry mentors of that year, and then assembled them into a short type-based film.