One Week Agency

Pics were taken by Derek Anderson using a Nikon D600.

A selection of images documenting the presentation day. We had four different creative teams all presenting in the same afternoon, at three different locations. Team RAPP presented in the RAPP studio in Leith, Team IL and Team Heedi presented in the College at Studio R310, and Team Lewis presented at the Lewis Agency, also in Leith. All four team will now present to Edinburgh Zoo on April 10th. Read more about the project here.

Not Another Deadline...

Hot on the heels of the recently passed D&AD deadline, this week sees the cut-toff for student entries to the Marketing Society's annual Star Awards.  Hopefully all of our final year students have submitted their entries (even though they are on holiday).

The first submission is a written brief, which is then shortlisted, and we should hear early-May if any of our students have made the shortlist this time around.

Our 2012 graduate Steven Brown won the Star Creative award last year, whilst 2011 graduate Ross Duncan took Silver the year before.

More:
Marketing Society Scotland Star Awards 2013
Star Awards winners 2012

Red Card Win

Graphic design student Zsuzsanna Slezak was a winning finalist in the Show Racism the Red Card competition. This creative award is sponsored by the SQA and the Scottish Football Association, and the prize-giving is held annually at Hampden Park in Glasgow.

This year there were more than 2000 entries across all categories, and Zsuzsanna won first prize in the Further Education category, the third time in four years that one of our students has won. Her anti-racism poster will now be printed and used as part of Show Racism the Red Card's anti-racism publicity throughout Scotland in 2013/14, and the artwork will go to all schools, colleges and councils.

Edinburgh College Vice-Principal (Granton Campus) Craig Wilson, and Design Tutor Alex Gunn accompanied Zsuzsanna to Hampden to represent the College and the Creative Industries Department.  Zsuzsanna won tickets for the Scottish cup semi- final of her choice, and the Graphics team will receive £200 for departmental resources from Barr Printers.

Zsuzsanna's winning poster design.

Zsuzsanna picks up her prize from the officials and sponsors.

Horizon Editorial

Horizon Magazine Covers, by Alasdair Muir.

With our HND groups out of the studio for their One Week Agency project,  our NC Graphics have taken advantage of the extra studio time to finish up two concurrent projects on the same day. 

Firstly, ZERO, a live brief to design a poster for a cross-campus campaign promoting Zero Tolerance to verbal and physical abuse, and secondly, HORIZON, their first editorial project, to arrange three travel articles into double-page spreads for a lifestyle magazine. We've posted some of the results on our Project Samples Board at Pinterest, and as a taster, have included a couple of Horizon magazine cover ideas, from Alasdair Muir.

We love unzoosual clients

The One Week Agency project kicks off on Monday, and we can reveal that the client is Edinburgh Zoo.

Earlier this year we had a discussion with the Zoo's Marketing team about a possible collaboration as part of their Centenary celebrations. Opened in July 1913, Edinburgh Zoo is just a couple of miles to the west of Edinburgh city centre, and is home to more than 1,000 rare and endangered animals. The star attractions, the Giant Pandas, had already helped to increase footfall significantly this year, but the Marketing team were looking for a campaign targeted at twenty and thirty-somethings, traditionally the toughest sector to attract to zoos.

Our students visited the Zoo last Thursday to get their research started, and on Monday morning they'll sit down with their respective mentors to analyse the brief and get organised into their agency roles. And then we are off.

Monkey Business at Edinburgh Zoo for our Graphics students.

A RAPPturous week ahead

It's almost time to get ready. Has it really been twelve months since we ran our One Week Agency project?  Last year we piloted a one week educational experiment, splitting up our HND design students into two agency teams to work on a live client brief alongside an industry mentor. You can read more about that project here.

This year we're doing it all again, but with an even more ambitious remit.  We've assembled four student teams to work with four different industry collaborators - mentors Ian Kirkby (Lewis), Veronica Ferguson (Heedi), Iain Lauder (IL Design) and Jen Wood (RAPP).  Jen has also invited one team to take up residence in the RAPP studio for the whole week, where she and her agency colleagues will be providing authentic project support.

Last year the live brief was for Letts Diaries, this time around the work is for a major Edinburgh-based public attraction (the details of which we'll announce shortly). We'll be documenting each stage of the process with the four groups, and the presentations for the project will take place next Friday.  Then it's over to the client to make their decision!

One Week Agency runs from 18th-22nd March.

Vinyl / Digital

Alongside their YCN and D&AD projects, our HNC group have been working on an interesting digital project. The class were asked to pick a famous 12" record sleeve, designed pre-1990, and to tell the story of the record and its design in a single scrolling webpage.

As luck would have it, the project coincided with a visit to Edinburgh by legendary sleeve designer Vaughan Oliver, who talked at the recent LongLunch event. A good number of the class turned up to see him talk about his seminal work for 4AD, and this provided plenty of creative inspiration. No-one actually chose a VO cover, but the range of selections included classic album artwork from David Bowie, Pattie Smith,and the Rolling Stones, through to the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Blondie, Nirvana, Dela Soul, Meatloaf and not unsurprisingly, Pink Floyd.

We'll be inviting industry mentor Alan Lennon in to view the final designs sometime very soon, but in the meantime here is a sneak preview from the work of Emil Bloom, who chose the Beatles White album, and produced a fully responsive storyboard combining some nice typography and illustration.





You can also view the webpage.

Thursday was Pitch Day

Busy and inspired today, with mentor and former Creative Director at Redpath, Iain Lauder, sitting in on presentations for both our HNC and HND groups.

The HNC were pitching ideas for a top-secret project that will eventually become the promotional campaign for our 2013 final show (for which Iain will provide the Art Direction). The winning design came from Ryan Allan, who will work alongside Iain during April to get the campaign visuals ready for launch.

The presentations at 11am featured our final year students going through their D&AD solutions. Some of the students worked in teams this year, and the briefs they tackled included Batiste, Ted Baker, Dept. of Health, BBC, Nissan, and Unilever. This year a lot of the work is digital, both motion graphics and for devices, with a healthy dose of outdoor/guerrilla thrown in. The deadline for submission is next Friday, and sample work will be posted once the judging is underway.