Chocolate Presentations

The HND 2nd Year surprised our panel of Mentors, and themselves, by pitching five amazingly inventive and well-realised concepts for the Chocolate brief.

There was a real atmosphere in the studio (should that the the 'boardroom'? :), and thanks to Helena's excellent organisation, everything ran very smoothly. The groups delivered their ideas, visuals and concepts very professionally, with lots of nice team interplay, and every pitch put forward a convincing case for the winning idea.

The mentors took copious notes and provided some great feedback for each group, and despite a few insightful disagreements, were remarkably united in declaring 'Choc - Chocolate with Character' the winner. So congratulations to Artur, Duncan and Carolann - You're Hired!

A second Mentor brief has now been issued, and rather than one project, the class will have to take on a number of different projects, including rebranding a Fish Tackle Shop, reworking the Olympic 2012 Logo, creating a web presence for an extreme sports outlet, and developing a campaign for the 65th Anniversay Memorial of the Holocaust. Wow.

Detail from 'Choc' Packaging : (Artur, Duncan, Carolann)




Detail from 'White Lies' Packaging : (Hannah, Lisa and Paulina)





Detail from 'Aztec Gold' Packaging : (Tania, Jonathan, Julie)




Detail from 'Fetish' Packaging : (Amanda, Ola and Gunnar)




More packaging to follow ... and the posters will all soon appear in the gallery page.

You're hired!

The second years have been set a tough task as their first project. Based around the final episode of the Apprentice they must create and promote a new range of chocolates. Working in teams they have just 2 weeks to put a presentation together that will be shown to all the Mentors on the 23rd September. This evening will be the first opportunity for both Mentors and students to meet. There will be no firing though only hiring and ultimately that will be the choice of the 8 Mentors.

This year we have 4 new Mentors on the team. We are very grateful to all the designers who have offered up their time and energy to work the students throughout the year. This is a tremendous opportunity for our final year group. Next week we hope to allocate students to Mentors.

In the meantime I will be doing my 'Margaret' bit and observing how each of the teams are working - watch out for the raised eyebrows!

Now where did I put that box of chocolates......

Perception

One of the projects the first years are working on at the minute is based around the word 'perception'. The brief allows students to be both designer and curator for the National Gallery. In our first class together we spent quite a bit of time looking at the different meanings of the word. Working in teams of 2 we then transfered all our thoughts on to the 'concept wall'. This will be left up for the duration of the project and the second years were encouraged to add any thoughts they may have about the project. We discussed what we would include in the gallery and how we could use the space to challenge people's perception.

We looked at some interesting presentations on the TED talks website - one of my all time favourites- and used images from Flicker to challenge how many of our perceptions are built around a persons appearance. Some great feedback! I am looking forward to seeing how the ideas develop over the week.

Check out Natasha Tsakos multimedia theatrical adventure and Tom Wujec on the 3 ways the brain creates meaning all on ted.com

YEAR 2 : Mentor Brief

The first mentor brief for the Year 2 class cmoes from Graeme Cook from Elmwood. This is a short project which should get everyone thinking, and you are required to take the following shape/symbol, and 'make it your own'.



This is concept-based project where you are asked to do some thing amazing with the simple shape above. It's a vector file, so the solution needs to be created using vectors.

The deadline is Tuesday 15th Sept. You can email your submission to me before then, or alternatively email it direct to Graeme on Tuesday. Good luck!

Induction Project '09

Day one and the first and second years were expected to rise to the challenge. Given just one word - reverse- they were asked to put a 5 minute presentation together selling whatever product the word suggested to them. This was a great opportunity for both years to mix and hopefully learn from each other. For the second years it was an opportunity to meet the first years that they are going to be Mentoring over the year. This is a new proposal and one that we hope will allow better integration between the two years.

Having just a day and a half to create the presentation, the results were really encouraging. Presentations ranged from a reverse dining experience - you got your coat when you arrived and the menu when you finished - to a game show that showed us the answers before we heard the questions.

We all voted for the winning presentation with the Game Show being the overall winner. It was great to see the different concepts and how well everyone worked as a team. It is obvious even at this early stage that we have two really strong classes. It makes the journey very exciting for all of us!