Rare Sight

HND1 have just presented their 'Rare Sight' project - a campaign promoting an exhibition at Newcastle's Baltic, celebrating unusual visual themes, or rare sights, natural or otherwise.

A standout submission came from Emils Blums Blumanis, who experimented with a red filter layering effect in Illustrator and came up with a pair of posters each featuring two overlaid images, where the second image becomes visible when you put on red filter glasses. A great concept, nicely executed. Difficult to capture the interactivity in still images though, but here goes -

The Future of Advertising

On Friday our students were lucky enough to have a visit from Murray Calder, Chair of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) and a Director at advertising giants, MediaCom.

Murray, who was recently named in the DRUM's Power 100, gave a great talk on the future of advertising. He looked at the rise of digital and its increasingly dominant market share of advertising revenues.

Some of the emerging ideas he looked at included digital device convergence, interactive video, and near-field communication, along with various the strategies now being used to target smaller groups of consumers who in turn use social media to extend the reach of the message.

Murray described a 'layer cake' approach, where the traditional forms of static advertising – print, TV, outdoor, door drops - can all be integrated via smartphones to create more immersive, interactive content. He also used a nice quote by Smithery's John Willshire that creatives 'need to be making things people need, rather than making people need things'. Inspiring stuff.

More Info:
www.mediacom.com
www.smithery.co/about/
www.ipa.co.uk

Mentoring Session

Our HND class recently got the chance to meet their mentors for the first session of the year. Our mentor line-up remains unchanged except for the welcome inclusion of Jen Wood, an Art Director at RAPP Edinburgh.

Unfortunately, Jen and a more familiar face, Iain Lauder of Redpath, were unable to make the mentoring night, but the rest of the lineup were all there, looking at the students work and sharing their thoughts and ideas about the year ahead, and discussing the sort of preparation our designers will need when they head out into industry.


Ian Farmer listening intently.


Line Digital's Rufus Spiller having fun.


Family's Kirsten Murray checking out a nice sketchbook.


LEWIS's Ian Kirkby putting some old technology to good use.

Typography Posters

As well as the Mentor project, which the class have just been issued, two of the main HND projects during the early part of this semester will be Typography and Editorial, the latter working alongside our HND Photography students.

As a warm-up, the class revisited asymmetric typography and the compound grid, and came up with these nice A4 posters during a session last week.

She's 'A' Winner

Earlier this week HND student Katy Johnson attended the annual YCN Student Awards Ceremony at Shoreditch Town Hall in London. Design Tutor Helena Good accompanied Katy to see her pick up a coveted 'A' certificate.