Star Creative Shortlist

For the fifth time in six years we're celebrating good news from the Marketing Society Scotland, who have shortlisted our final year design student Charlie Law for the Star Creative Award 2016.   This award is in the Development category, sponsored by Union Direct, and requires students from Universities and Colleges in Scotland to submit a written proposal and moodboard to a brief set by a high-profile client.

This year the client was the Scottish Government, and the brief was to highlight gender inequality and the pay gap in the business sector in Scotland. Only four entries made the shortlist this year, and they were then required to develop their idea and present it to the judging panel last Friday at the Union's studio in Edinburgh.  Charlie's presentation featured a clever twist on gender stereotypes and some engaging copywriting.  We'll post up samples of his work in due course.

The winner will be announced at the Marketing Society Star Awards, on June 9th at the Corn Exchange in Edinburgh, the annual celebration of Scotland's world-class marketing community. You can find out more about the awards, including the shortlists across all the professional categories, at the Star Awards 2016 website.

Spreading The Word

Our NC class have just finished their first editorial project 'Interview'.  For this work, they interviewed HND students whilst they were out on placement at some of Edinburgh's best agencies. The class gathered the interview source along with some great photos of the HND class, and then set about designing some nice Q&A-style spreads.  We've posted a batch of samples on Pinterest, and have included three striking pieces here -


Aga Pomaranska interviewed Aiste Piechaviciute at Whitespace.


Ken Sjoberg interviewed Alex De Sousa at APS


Julia Martins interviewed Olga Kominek at Lewis

#oneweek8

Our 8th One Week project kicks off today, featuring HNC and Final Year students, working alongside 5 agencies - Multiply, Realise, Teviot, Whitespace and Blonde.

Our client this year is the National Galleries of Scotland, and the student teams have one week to answer the brief and present a solution to their respective agencies and to the tutor panel. Follow all the action on twitter at #oneweek8.

Talking Magazines

Earlier this week we had a visit from Eric Campbell, Creative Director at White Light Media, an award-winning Edinburgh-based agency specialising in editorial design, magazines, and publishing in print and online. They've been consistent supporters of the course for a number of years (Eric is a graduate of the course) and he came in to talk to the NC and HNC classes about the joys of editorial design and the general approach thats required in the niche market area of magazines.


Eric talking editorial design in the studio.

White Light Media's work includes their cool specialist drinks mag Hot Rum Cow, and Eric brought in a box of Issue No.7, and also the quarterly tabloid-sized magazine, Poppy.  Awesome stuff.


White Light samples

The NC group are currently working on an editorial brief 'Interview', so this was great timing for them.  The brief was to interview our HND students whilst they were out on placement, and find out about their experiences, and then use that as source for magazine spreads that will be included in our forthcoming annual review magazine, InSitu.