U In The Wild

As part of our graduate show, One Night Stand, we exhibited HND student Jonathan Walton's engaging and impressive shortlisted entry for the Marketing Society's Star Creative Award. The brief, set by Scottish Natural Heritage, was a tricky one - to encourage 16-25 year old's to visit and responsibly use Scotland’s National Natural Reserves (NNRs). The tone needed to be fun, engaging, and inspirational, so Jonathan's concept was to spoof the youth-focused marketing used to promote outdoor music festivals (in this case T in the Park). Using a variety of channels, the campaign would encourage the target audience to enjoy a sensory festival of wildlife and landscape.

One Thing You Can Do

Some great feedback cards from our industry friends after their visit to our sell-out One Night Stand show at the Traverse in Edinburgh. The card asked an industry guest to commit to doing one thing for our course - a talk, a mentor meeting, a visiting lecture, a placement, a review - or anything else worthwhile in support of our next cohort.

We're just waiting for a batch of photos of the evening from our talented photography-in-residence Derek Anderson, then we'll post up a gallery of the event.

Sneak Peeks

Today is the last Friday before our annual show - traditionally the busiest and most stressful day of the year in the studio! Thought it might be nice to post a sneak peek of some work to get everyone in the mood for One Night Stand, so here are two award-winning pieces.

Firstly, Katy Johnson's shortlisted entry to the Marketing Society's Star Creative Award 2013 - 'Visit & Exhibit' (client - Scottish Natural Heritage).




And secondly, Elan Tang's YCN Commendation - an animated advert for Experian, to encourage younger people to save and build up a credit rating.

Award-winning Friday

On Friday we received the fantastic news that our students recorded award wins in both YCN and D&AD. We picked up two YCN commendations for HNC Graphic Design, and a further two in HND Interactive Design. You can check the results here.

The team also received their magic emails from D&AD, with the news that Alistair Kerr and Hussain Al-khirsan, HND Graphic Design, took a Best of Year at D&AD for their Dept of Health DARE brief.



The winning work will be exhibited at our graduate show One Night Stand, on May 29th at the Traverse Theatre Bar, but you can check out samples of the D&AD Best of Year on the D&AD website. Very well done to all.

One is getting there

Just about there with the next stage of our One Night Stand campaign - the postcard and voucher mailshot to all our confirmed industry attendees. Going out Monday.

Words of Wisdom

With the class of 2013 about to exhibit their final projects at One Night Stand, we thought a few pieces of advice from a former graduate might be appropriate.

Hannah Bloomfield, a designer with award-winning agency Multiply UK, and one of our graduates in 2010, delivered a nice talk last year about her experience of moving from education into industry, featuring these excellent slides:

Looking for Talent

We've just announced the details of our 2013 graduate show, and this year we are doing things a bit differently. We've decided to exhibit for a single night only, and invite everyone we know from industry along with our students, their friends and families.

The venue is Edinburgh's rather awesome Traverse Theatre Bar, the date is Wednesday May 29th, and the time is from 6pm onwards until late.

Our campaign is called 'one night stand', a concept put together by Iain Lauder, mentor and former Creative Director at Redpath, plus Ryan Allan, one of our up-and-coming HNC students. We'll be rolling it out at various points over the next two weeks or so, so look out for it on twitter @design_etc, in your mailbox, and out there on the streets of Scotland's Capital.

The work on show this year will span as broad a range of visual communication as ever - editorial, packaging, digital, motion graphics, brand communications, and possibly even a few surprises. So if you are in Edinburgh on May 29th and fancy seeing some brilliant student design work, let us know if you can attend by visiting www.etcshow.net

Star Creative Shortlist

This year's Marketing Society Scotland Star Awards shortlist have been announced, and two of our students, Jonathan Walton and Katy Johnson, have been selected in the Star Creative Student category.



There are 30 professional awards across five categories, and two student awards - Marketing Student and Star Creative, both open to a range of creative courses at Scotland's Universities and Art Schools.

The first round of the contest consists of a written submission to a set brief (supplied this year by Scottish Natural Heritage). Submissions are shortlisted to just six students, and they are then invited to present visuals to support their concept. We've had shortlisted entries for three consecutive years since being invited to participate in 2011 (including overall winner in 2012).

The Star Awards will take place on June 6th at the Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow.

Provenance Font

Some experimental typography today in the studio. As part of his major project, an arts magazine entitled 'Provenance', final year student Michal Grazewicz has designed a typeface, called, appropriately enough, Provenance. 

The form is based around the simple geometry of a square, and despite the limitations this imposes on legibility in terms of copy, its ideal for the extremely large pointsizes and single glyphs he's planning to use in his layout.  The full magazine, in print and dps formats, will feature as part of Michal's exhibited work later this month.