Pitching to the Panel

After a tough but exciting week, our design teams will be pitching to our creative panel from 1pm today.

The five teams worked for the week with Lewis, Realise, Teviot, the Union, and Whitespace, and took on 'Fortune Favours the Brave', D&AD's own brief in the 2016 New Blood Awards.


Team Whitespace - a late one last night getting their presentation finalised.

The panel - Sheryl Newsome, Gerry Farrell and Alan Ainsley - won't be aware which team worked at which agency during the presentations.  Some of our mentors and Partnership colleagues will also be attending and they'll get to sit in on every pitche, so we should have a really exciting piece of employer engagement.  And of course a bunch of brilliant ideas to look at and assess.

Fortune Favours The Brave

Our final year students popped up to the rather awesome Whitespace studios today in central Edinburgh to get briefed on the new one week project.

This will be our 7th One Week, and this time around we have five teams of design students working alongside five of Edinburgh's top agencies - Lewis, Realise, Teviot, the Union and Whitespace.  The client this year is none other than D&AD, and the students will be tackling the brief which D&AD have included in the New Blood Awards for 2016 - 'Fortune Favours The Brave'.

Senior Designer at Whitespace Neil Walker and Creative Director Adam Smith did a couple of inspiring talks to the teams, and the project formally kicks off on Monday, with the presentations on Friday. As an added twist this year, we've assembled an independent panel of creatives to assess the results when the teams present.

Sheryl Newsome (Deputy Creative Director at Story), Alan Ainsley (a former Creative Director of the Leith Agency) and Leith Agency legend Gerry Farrell (now running Gerry Farrell Ink) will be the judging panel.  We've also got Greig Anderson from Freytag Anderson reviewing the presentations once the project is over to provide some extra feedback to our students.

You can follow the project on social media with the hashtag #oneweek7 and on Storify.


D&AD setting the tone for #oneweek7


One of the teams, happy to be here outside Whitespace.


Getting organised at Whitespace.


Neil Walker talking shop.


A team discussion already?!

Celebrity Spreads

Some nice examples from 'Celebrity Spreads' - an HNC Graphics typography project focussing on print editorial design. The requirements - a celebrity photo, a full bleed layout, and a few hundred words.



Blonde - Christina Giannakou


Fassbender - Dora Bowman


Jaar - Ildiko Rohonka


Florence - Sarah Mary Macrae

Just Traditional Types

Each year we make a pilgrimage to Innerleithen in the Scottish Borders to visit Robert Smail's Printing Works.

Founded in 1866, Robert Smail's Printing Works provided quality printed materials to Scotland for 120 years until its closure in1986, when the property was taken over by the National Trust for Scotland. It remains the only operational jobbing printer of its kind in country, and represents an important part of Scotland's industrial heritage.

This year we made two visits, one with our NC Graphics group, and a second visit with both HNC Graphics and HNC Interactive Design. The team at Robert Smail's gave each group a brilliant tour of the workshop, from the type specimens, printing press machinery and letterpress to the extensive and fascinating archive. The students also got a chance to typeset their own names in metal type and then letterpress print the results.

A visit to this amazing workshop is a bit like going back in time, and the traditional machinery, techniques and experience of working with real type is still a key ingredient in design education that we find inspires student designers and informs their the modern digitally-orientated typographical work in their projects.













All pics by Chris Radley, HNC Graphic Design