Typecast Posters

For their typography project this year the HNC worked in pairs on a project called 'Typecast'. We put a set of 12 names in a hat - 6 typographers and 6 typeface designers. Each pair of students picked one out, and then were tasked with explooring their subject and then creating two A2 posters in celebration of their chosen designer. 

The typographers were : Neville Brody, April Greiman, Reid Miles, George Olden, Paula Scher and Wolfgang Weingart. 

The typeface designers were : Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger, Herb Lubalin, Bruno Maag, Erik Spiekermann, Carol Twombly. 

Once this project was completetd we exhibited in the new BA Studio as part of our annual Mentor Night - where our industry mentors gather to kick off the mentoring programme each year. Designers love type and obviously they loved these posters.  

The font used for the Typecast  name was also designed by a former student Terry Smith, who is now Senior Porudct Designer at Dyson in Bristol and a long-standing mentor, and the A2s were printed on 180gsm matte paper at Edinburgh Copyshop.

Creative Edinburgh Awards

An integral part of our new BA (Hons ) programme is that our students are organsied into discrete teams and work on a range of live projects throiughout the year. One project that came in was to design and create a set of 10 awards for the Creative Edinburgh Awards Tenth Anniversary this year.

The Awards celebrate the city's creative community, highlighting the projects, people and places that flourish across Edinburgh and continually ensuring its place on the cultural map, nationally and internationally. Check out the winners here.

Each of the awards represents a category and our students took each category as a theme and devised a set designs laser-etched into 7X7" bamboo plates. Its always great to get a real hands-on proejct and this brief combined illustration, typography and product design. Here are the results:

D&AD New Blood winner

HND student Ellie Chalmers recently won a D&AD for her take on the Walkers Crisps brief.  Ellie's concept of 'open up' cleverly captured the essence of the breif, to get younger men talking about their emotions and mental health issues.  Ellie is amongst the 181 winners this year, from many 1000's of entries, and this is the our 10th D&AD for Vis Comm since 2010, not a bad success rate.  You can check out some of Ellie's work below and the full project here - D&AD New Blood.  

Next year Ellie is progressing onto our new BA (Hons) year (in conjunction with Kingston University London), which will see 21 HN studnets from across Graphics, User Experience and Illustration work towards a brand new degree qualification focussed on Industry, Collaboration and creative excellence.

End-Of-Year Show 2022

Mentor Quotes

Today we are revisiting a charming and insightful project by 2015 graduate Kiera Winfield, who collated a series of quotes about the course from our industry mentors of that year, and then assembled them into a short type-based film.

Editorial : Creative Friendships

For their recent editorial project, the HNC class were given a brief to explore creative friendships from a selection of three - Ella Fizgerald and Marilyn Monroe, Nick Cave and Kyle Minogue, and David Bowie and George Undrewood. The brief for this required the students to focus not only on the connections between the subjects, but also the connectiosn between type and image inside the space - for this project set at two facing A3 pages. Here are three great examples focussing on the relationship between jazz great Ella Fitzgerald and movie star Marilyn Monroe -

1. Eric Molina
2. Paloma Aguilar
3. Daryl Hutton
4. Katie Slesser

A Time and A Place : Riso Print Exhibition

One of our 2021 Graphic Design graduates, Gemma Gorton, a D&AD New Blood winner, is currently Artist-in-Residence at Out Of The Blueprint risop studio in Leith, and is exhibiting a new body of work created during her time there. Capturing the changing colours of her Edinburgh home, Gemma’s work gives a glimpse of a quiet city of street scenes, public parks and under-explored nooks through dawn, dusk and twilight.A3 prints, a set of stamps and an amazing flickbook comprise a beautiful set of riso explorations.

'A Time and a Place' provides a a reflective and insightful perspective and presents a very particular time and a very particular place. Out of the Blueprint is a social enterprise supporting young artists in Scotland through the power of print. Find out more.
The exhibition runs from 12 March – 23 April 2022 at Out of the Blue Drill Hall, Monday-Saturday, 10am-5pm and is free.