Bob Is No Animal

It's the last college day of 2014 for our final year students, and today they were presenting 'Make Your Mark', a self-branding project. We normally run this brief as part of their portfolio production in preparation for going out on work placement in February, but with the Berlin trip taking place in the last week in January, we decided to bring it forward.

Branding yourself and creating something that feels fresh but has longevity and catches your personality and working style is always tricky for a designer. This year the results are as good as we've ever had, with lots of impressive thinking, experimentation and careful execution.

You can view some of the presented work on our Pinterest board, and here is a taster from a standout effort by Craigh Roberston, who kicked off the presentations with his 'Bob Is No Animal' mark - a clever working of his initials into a memorable design. The full set of finished visuals are on Craigh's Behance, but here are a few samples showing the development of the mark -

Visiting Time

As well as all our project activity, over the past few weeks we've enjoyed a number of visits from industry practitioners and supporters of the course.

Back in November, Michael Heins from Lewis came in and did a talk (which you can read about here), and we also had a visit from Terry Smith, a designer at Peach in Glasgow, who graduated in 2012 and is a recent recruit to our 'Design Buddy' scheme. Terry brought in three years' worth of sketchbooks for our archive and shared some of his thoughts on design with our NC group.


Terry Smith juggling his sketchbooks.

More recently Prof. Keith McIntyre, the Reader in Visual Art and Interdisciplinary Practices at Northumbria University was visiting the Dept and dropped into the studio to see what we were doing. We also had day-long visit from Garry Kane, a designer at Storm Ideas, an offshoot of the award-winning Leith-based digital agency Storm ID, who specialise in viral marketing and experimental social media strategies.


Garry Kane offering some advice in the studio.

Garry graduated HND Interactive Design in 2010, and prior to Storm Ideas,  was part of the design team at the Union, (coincidentally, alongside Terry Smith) and worked on digital campaigns for some of Scotland's top brands. He presented his portfolio and talked about the relationship between digital design and front-end development, and how he has managed to bridge that gap in his own career.

Also in for a short visit and a spot of lunch was Mike Donoghue, whose experience in marketing and advertising has included stints at Saachti & Saatchi, WWAV Rapp Collins, and most recently, StoryUK.  Mike has been a long-time supporter of the course, but this was the first time he had actually visited the college to see the studio and meet students whilst they worked.