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.

Editorial : Creative Friendships

For their recent editorial project, the HNC class were given a brief to explore creative friendships from a selection of three - Ella Fizgerald and Marilyn Monroe, Nick Cave and Kyle Minogue, and David Bowie and George Undrewood. The brief for this required the students to focus not only on the connections between the subjects, but also the connectiosn between type and image inside the space - for this project set at two facing A3 pages. Here are three great examples focussing on the relationship between jazz great Ella Fitzgerald and movie star Marilyn Monroe -

1. Eric Molina
2. Paloma Aguilar
3. Daryl Hutton
4. Katie Slesser

A Time and A Place : Riso Print Exhibition

One of our 2021 Graphic Design graduates, Gemma Gorton, a D&AD New Blood winner, is currently Artist-in-Residence at Out Of The Blueprint risop studio in Leith, and is exhibiting a new body of work created during her time there. Capturing the changing colours of her Edinburgh home, Gemma’s work gives a glimpse of a quiet city of street scenes, public parks and under-explored nooks through dawn, dusk and twilight.A3 prints, a set of stamps and an amazing flickbook comprise a beautiful set of riso explorations.

'A Time and a Place' provides a a reflective and insightful perspective and presents a very particular time and a very particular place. Out of the Blueprint is a social enterprise supporting young artists in Scotland through the power of print. Find out more.
The exhibition runs from 12 March – 23 April 2022 at Out of the Blue Drill Hall, Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm and is free.

Love Design Week 2021

We are kicking off the 2021 session with a week-long design conference this year. This is a new way of running the induction week, and for the first time will be a fully integrated series of events which both Graphics Design and User Expereince students can participate in. The programme features speakers for all sorts of creative backgrounds and includes many with strong connections to the course. The talks are based around themes including Industry, process and Inspiration. Some of the speakers will be deliverign their talks from the Studio R310 here in the college, but others will be further afield, including Amsterdam, Berlin, and even Tasmania.  Hopefully this will be the perfect platform to get all our classes engaged as we move back towards face-to-face teaching later this Semester.  LDW Programme - 

Monday

LDW Event #1 : 10.30AM on Zoom

Jason Little (Co-Founder/Executive Creative Director, For The People) talks about design, ethics and going global. Jason will be joining us live from Tasmania.

LDW Event #2 : 2PM on Zoom
Ayesha Islam (The Covey Agency), a 2017 graduate and DMA Breakthrough winner, talks about her journey from college to a career in design.

LDW Event #3 : 2PM on Zoom
UX Professional Poppy Reid and Emma Chapman (Product Designer at whereismytransport.com) talk about their work in the world of digital design.

Tuesday

‍LDW Event #4 : 10.30 AM on Zoom
Former graduate Terry Smith talks about his career development, from Art Director at the Union in Edinburgh, to his current role as a Product Design at Dyson in Bristol.

LDW Event #5 : 2PM on Zoom
Berlin-based Designer and Design Sprint pioneer Rob Hamblin shares insights from his work at AJ&Smart and his new company, betheleap.

Wednesday

LDW Event #6 : 10AM on Zoom
Gemma Gorton (D&AD Pencil 2020) & Pav Vorobjovs (YCN 2019) chat about why we enter student design awards, and what it takes to win one.

LDW Event #7 : 2PM on Zoom
Ken Sjoberg (Code Clan, Peccadillo Pictures) discusses his ongoing personal film poster project, recently showcased by Adobe.

LDW Event #8 : 2PM on Zoom
Edinburgh-based freelancer Scott Boobis talks about his design process, including lettering, editorial and kinetic type.

Thursday

LDW Event #9 : 9.30AM on Zoom
Alvaro Sotomayor (Senior Creative Director at W+K in Amsterdam) discusses the Corona Better World campaign, and then sets a one-day brief. Students will be organised into breakout rooms / small teams to work on the project, with input from guest designers during the day. Each team will do a short presentation of ideas to the group from 2.30-3.30PM.

Friday

LDW Event #10 : 10AM on Zoom
Former students offer up words of wisdom and discuss how the design world is changing. Natalie Loh (Designer, Createfuture), Dan Plunkett and Steph Dalzell (Designers & Co-Founders, Pretty Good Studio).