Graduate Show 2023

 Announcing our end -of-year Graduate Show, which is at the Fruitmarket and runs from June 3rd till the 11th this year - more than a whole week's worth of amazing art & design to come and see across our 8 HN courses and the new BA (Hons) in Visual Communication.  We'll be releasing details of the private view and other one-off events during the exhibition week.  More info at the Fruitmarket website.

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.

Love Design Week 2021

We are kicking off the 2021 session with a week-long design conference this year. This is a new way of running the induction week, and for the first time will be a fully integrated series of events which both Graphics Design and User Expereince students can participate in. The programme features speakers for all sorts of creative backgrounds and includes many with strong connections to the course. The talks are based around themes including Industry, process and Inspiration. Some of the speakers will be deliverign their talks from the Studio R310 here in the college, but others will be further afield, including Amsterdam, Berlin, and even Tasmania.  Hopefully this will be the perfect platform to get all our classes engaged as we move back towards face-to-face teaching later this Semester.  LDW Programme - 

Monday

LDW Event #1 : 10.30AM on Zoom

Jason Little (Co-Founder/Executive Creative Director, For The People) talks about design, ethics and going global. Jason will be joining us live from Tasmania.

LDW Event #2 : 2PM on Zoom
Ayesha Islam (The Covey Agency), a 2017 graduate and DMA Breakthrough winner, talks about her journey from college to a career in design.

LDW Event #3 : 2PM on Zoom
UX Professional Poppy Reid and Emma Chapman (Product Designer at whereismytransport.com) talk about their work in the world of digital design.

Tuesday

‍LDW Event #4 : 10.30 AM on Zoom
Former graduate Terry Smith talks about his career development, from Art Director at the Union in Edinburgh, to his current role as a Product Design at Dyson in Bristol.

LDW Event #5 : 2PM on Zoom
Berlin-based Designer and Design Sprint pioneer Rob Hamblin shares insights from his work at AJ&Smart and his new company, betheleap.

Wednesday

LDW Event #6 : 10AM on Zoom
Gemma Gorton (D&AD Pencil 2020) & Pav Vorobjovs (YCN 2019) chat about why we enter student design awards, and what it takes to win one.

LDW Event #7 : 2PM on Zoom
Ken Sjoberg (Code Clan, Peccadillo Pictures) discusses his ongoing personal film poster project, recently showcased by Adobe.

LDW Event #8 : 2PM on Zoom
Edinburgh-based freelancer Scott Boobis talks about his design process, including lettering, editorial and kinetic type.

Thursday

LDW Event #9 : 9.30AM on Zoom
Alvaro Sotomayor (Senior Creative Director at W+K in Amsterdam) discusses the Corona Better World campaign, and then sets a one-day brief. Students will be organised into breakout rooms / small teams to work on the project, with input from guest designers during the day. Each team will do a short presentation of ideas to the group from 2.30-3.30PM.

Friday

LDW Event #10 : 10AM on Zoom
Former students offer up words of wisdom and discuss how the design world is changing. Natalie Loh (Designer, Createfuture), Dan Plunkett and Steph Dalzell (Designers & Co-Founders, Pretty Good Studio).

Hot Issues in Graphic Design

HNC Graphic Design recently completed their design-in-context essays - a 1500 word exploration of a hot topic in Visual Communication. The essay questions included controversial subjects in creative advertising, such as sex, alcohol and tobacco, plus design trends, and also the option to explore a single typeface. As part of this project we also asked the group to design and publish their essay in booklet format. Working with content you have written yourself is always an interesting challenge, and you can check out some example covers and spreads below, and view the full range of visual ideas on this project at our issuu digital publication page at issuu.com

 
Sophia Bhullar - Sex Sells

McKenzie Armitage - Making Addiction Cool

Darik Malik - Design Sprints

Concours D'ecriture 2020

This is the second year that we have collaborated with The French Institute and both Napier and Edinburgh Universities in the annual Concours D'ecriture, where foreign language degree students compose a piece of creative writing, and the results are interpreted by our final year students as pieces of visual communication, expressed purely as typography.

Students submitted writing from Edinburgh, Napier, Stirling and St Andrews Universities, and these were judged by the partners this year - the French Institute, The Goethe Institute (Glasgow) and the Franco-Scottish Society.

Last year an exhibition of the work was held at the Institute, just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, but this year the exhibiton is all virtual - on screens at the French Institute and via instagram and the Institute's culture blog. The theme this year was music, with all the written entries being inspired by a piece of music. 

This allowed our students to think beyond print and produce some unsusual responses, including lenticular animation, video, light projections, editorial pieces and even packaging in the form of a chocolate wrapper. We also published the visuals, alongside all the written pieces, in a broadsheet newspaper, printed by Newspaper Club, and on display at the Institute during December.  Full details of the winning pieces, plus all the visual work can be found on the French Institute Culture blog here and the newspaper can be viewed at issuu.

Pav is YCN Student of the Year

To cap off a recent run of awards successes, we gathered last week at the virtual YCN Students Awards to see 4 Edinburgh College students (3 from Graphics Design and 1 from User Experience Design) pick up their YCN Commendations.

Nick Defty and the team at YCN hosted an excellent awards evening, with over 100 participants and a slide show featuriong all the commended work. As well as awarding commendations by brief, YCN also award a student of the year prize for the most outstanding submission, and this year it was shared by two students, Daniel Mason (for the Guardian brief, University of Lincoln) and our very own Pavils Vorobjovs for his work on the Oliver Bonas / Fedrigoni brief. All the commendees are featured here.

Since 2008 the Graphics course has picked up around 20 Commendations, but this is a first having one of our students recognised in this way, so its a tremendous achievement. You can check out Pav's awesome winning work here.

Star Awards 2020

More congratulations are in order as graduate HND student Balazs Hirth won the coveted Star Student Award at the Marketing Society Scotland Star Awards 2020.  His classmate Rachel Nesbitt also won a commendation, and we had four shortlisted entrants.

We've now won this award in no less than 7 of the last 10 years, a real testament to the quality of the students the course produces and also their ability to think, design and present to their peers and wider industry. 

This year the awards ceremnoy was virtual but that didn't lessen the excitement and the sense of celebration that the event generates right across Scotland's creative industry. Well done to all the winners and shortlisted stars.

Full list of winners

Teacher of the Year!

Massive congratulations ot our very own Helena Good who has been named teacher of the year at the Tes FE Awards, which celebrate the best of the UK’s further education sector.

Helena has been teaching Graphic Design at the college for 23 years across the NC, HNC and HND courses, and this award is the culmination of her tireless passion and championing of design education in Scotland and beyond.

As well as all her hard work shaping the mentoring programme and the course relationship with industry, and a huge contribution to the continued success of our students in nationla and international design awards, Helena has been the main vision behind the Daydream Believers programme – a pioneering project aimed at developing the transition from school to college for secondary students.. It is delivered in collaboration with student ambassadors and industry partners, and involves a number of high schools across Edinburgh. 

The judges described the programme as “the most important educational initiative in Scotland at the moment”. Helena also played a key role in the creation and delivery of the recent Creative Bravery Festival, reaching eductaors, students and creatives in over 60 countries. Star Power!

Full list of winners for Tes 2020

Get Real 2020

Jump over to Instagram to see the Get Real portfolio gallery for our class of 2020!

   

Commendations & Shortlists!

Some great news towards the end of the 2019-2020 term to help get us all through lockdown

Firstly our students have again been recognised with commendations in the 2020 YCN Student Awards.HNC Graphic Design students Valentina Torella and Elia Ballesteros picked up commendations for their submissions to briefs by Camden Town Brewery and Fedrigoni / Oliver Bonas respectively. This brings the course's run of commendations dating back as far as 2008 to a total of 21.

The YCN Awards started in 2001. Each year YCN publishes a collection of live creative, marketing and business challenges — written by partners, and distributed across the Further & Higher Education network.   Check out this year's full list of Commendations here and you can read a bit more about the success, including some nice quote over on the main college blog.

Secondly, we are also celebrating 4 of our final year students making the shortlist for the Marketing Society Star Awards.  Huge congratulations go to Melinda Babai, Gonzalo Cervilla, Balaz Hirth and Rachel Nesbit who all worked incredibly hard during the initial weeks of lockdown to complete their pitches for this competition. Check out the full shortlist here.  This year the Star Awards is a free virtual event,  broadcasting on October 22nd.

Visiting BILD

Our annual Berlin study trip again included a visit to Axel Springer - one of the largest publishers in the world and publisher of Europe's largest circulation newspaper, BILD.

Axel Springer's Head of Apprenticeships, Dual Studies & Talent Attraction, Uta Bendixen, organised a tour of the BILD Newsroom, which included a talk by BILD's Editor about the future of publishing, and how the company's graphic design team produces the newspaper, whose circulation is over 1.5m copies each day.

We also visited Axel Springer's incubator project Accelerator, a joint venture between Plug & Play Tech Center and Axel Springer SE, where startups and new technology brands are nurtured and developed - http://www.axelspringerplugandplay.com

One Week Winners

Team Union Direct (l/r) - Zoe Willis, Valentina Torella, Gonzalo Cervilla, Balazs Hirth & Rachel Platts-Smith.

Our most recent One Week project finished with a remarkable flourish after the client, Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) assembled a panel to judge the presentations for a second time.

The brief from SQA was to create a campaign to promote their new National Progression Award (NPA) in Creative Thinking to teachers and the parents and carers of pupils in Scottish secondary schools. For this project we were lucky to have support from some of our favourite collaborators - Amaze Realize, Campfire, Emperor, Neish, Lewis, Union Direct and Whitespace were all involved.

Each agency took a team for the week to work on a campaign idea before pitching the work to a panel of judges from the SQA at the Emperor agency. The judges realised that a second round of judging would be required to find a winner.

The second panel, including representatives from SQA and Education Scotland, assembled at Granton Campus last Thursday and duly selected Team Union Direct, featuring HND Graphic Design students Rachel Platts Smith, Gonzalo Cervilla, Balazs Hirth, Zoe Willis, Valentina Torella, and Ross McGrail.

Their ‘Creativity is Possibility’ concept featured a range of clever ideas and promotional materials to be sent to secondary schools across the country. Edinburgh College student Rachel Platts-Smith, from the winning team, said “We are very proud to be named the winners of this year’s competition. The key to our success was definitely teamwork. We’d like to thank our mentors at Union Direct who were there every step of the way and made this experience all the more enjoyable – we couldn’t have done it without them.”

Fiona Robertson, SQA Chief Executive, and a judge on the panel, commented that “Creativity is a hugely important skill and that’s why the NPA in Creative Thinking is such an exciting development. I am thankful to all the students from Edinburgh College who provided an incredible range of ideas for promoting the qualification.”

Also on the panel, Martin Boyle, Head of creative, Hospitality, and Sport at SQA, added: “It was thrilling to see the students tackle the brief with such commitment, and creativity. The whole project has been a fantastic example of engaging creative education in practice, bringing together the college, students and industry to create something special. Of course, this isn’t just a theoretical exercise. We hope to be in a position to be able offer our NPA in Creative Thinking to schools and colleges across the country, and utilise the work of team Union Direct in our activities. The standard of work the students presented was genuinely exceptional. I look forward to hearing more about their progress.”

Well done all and huge thanks both to the client and our amazing agency friends.

DMA 2019 Breakthrough Awards

Congratulations to Ida Bukantyte and Marta Winogrodzka who were both shortlisted for the DMA Breakthrough Awards 2019. Both were given the opportunity pitch to the DMA panel and the client, Direct Line, in London, and then attend the awards event, alongside with the other  finalists, as well as the great and good from across the Marketing community in the UK.


Ida (left) and Marta with their DMA Awards.

Ida picked up the Silver award with her ‘Don’t Guess’ solution, and Marta secured Bronze for ‘That moment’. The winning pair, Jack Brodie and Brodie Childs from Edinburgh Napier, shared a cash prize of £1,000, with Ida and Marta receiving £500 and £250 respectively. All four were also offered a placement at Direct Line Group’s agency, MRM McCann.

Concours d’écriture créative 2019

The HND Graphics class currently have an exhibition on show in Edinburgh at the French Institute. The set of 37 typographic posters are the result of an annual creative writing competition - 2019 concours d’écriture créativen - co-organised by Edinburgh Napier University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of St Andrews, Edinburgh College, the Franco-Scottish Society, the Goethe-Institut Glasgow and the Institut français d’Ecosse.

An award ceremony for the 2019 concours d’écriture créative took place on the opening night Nov 21st, followed by the exhibition displaying the winning texts in poster format. The exhibition will be on display until 13 December 2019, and is free to view. Some samples -



Quand tout a bascule, written by Julie Donier Meroz, designed by Zoe Leung.



Amants sans frontieres, written by Olivia Walsh, designed by Rachel Nesbitt.



Une lettre aux mais amis, written by Rachel Prowse, designed by Marta Dal Farra.



Le plus mauvais jour de ma vie !  written by Jan Palysa, designed by Melinda Babai



Mn passeport ! written by Viktoria Jancurova, designed by Balazs Hirth