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.

Pencil Time

Earlier this week D&AD announced the New Blood Award winners for 2017, and we were thrilled to see that our HND students Sarah Lewis and Jen Grieve have won a pencil. The pair submitted their idea for the National Autistic Society brief, and were amongst 11 winners that category.

Their project - the Three Rs - featured a clever animation and some innovate storytelling on a very sensitive and important social issue. Sarah and Jen will now attend the New Blood Awards in London in July where the pencil levels will be announced. This is the first D&AD award the course has won since 2013, and the our 4th win since 2010.


Check out their project here - Three Rs - NAS
More on the D&AD New Blood Awards 2017

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.

#gamechangers

Edinburgh College has been shortlisted at the Game Changer Awards, for a project by two of our HND Visual Communication (Graphic Design) students. The Awards recognise student-led projects or initiatives inspired by Glasgow 2014 and its legacy goals, and the aim is to celebrate outstanding contributions in the run-up to the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.

The six different categories of award cover the breadth of contribution that colleges and higher education institutions are able to make to the Games and to sport in Scotland. Edinburgh College was shortlisted in the Student Achievement category for 'DO:25', an initiative developed by graphic design students Hussain Al-Khirsan and Alistair Kerr. The pair created a campaign to motivate children and adults to take part in regular physical activity.

Their resulting App design breaks a day into 25-minute chunks, allowing you to organise around your schedule, making exercise more accessible and manageable. This project was actually set by the Dept. of Health, as the Open Brief at the D&AD New Blood Awards, and on submission it won a Best of Year.



Winners of the gold, silver and bronze awards will be announced at the Game Changer Awards dinner and ceremony on Thursday 3 April 2014. Scottish comedian and broadcaster, Fred MacAulay will be master of ceremonies for the evening, and special guests will include members of the Scottish Parliament, Scottish Government and Glasgow 2014 officials. And of course we will be there.

More:
Gamechanger Awards
Game Changer finalist list
DO:25 Best of Year D&AD

SQA Star Award for Innovation

With our students busy on the One Week project, we've found some time to celebrate picking up a 'Highly Commended' last week at the 2013 SQA Star Awards. The Awards recognise inspirational achievements and commitment from individuals, schools, colleges and organisations across Scotland, and our nomination came in the Innovation category. This was for our Mentoring Programme, a sector-leading example of employer engagement in Further and Higher Education.

The programme, now in its sixth year, has been hugely successful in helping prepare our students for a career in the creative industries, and this award recognises the exceptional commitment, energy and enthusiasm our mentors bring to the scheme.

The Ceremony,  held on Friday 8th at Glasgow Clyde College, was hosted by media personality Kaye Adams, and Design tutor Helena Good, along with Edinburgh College Vice-Principal Ray McGowan and Ian Kirkby (Design Director, Lewis) attended the event.

This has been an exceptional year for the HND Graphics course. As well as our students winning numerous awards - a D&AD Best-of-Year, 3 YCN Commendations, and Star Creative at the Scottish Marketing Society - the teaching team have picked up a Commendation at the Scottish Event Awards (for our One Night Stand graduate show), and now an SQA Star.

Later this month we have a chance to add to this haul - we've been shortlisted at the College Development Network Awards for our induction programme. This curricular initiative sits alongside the Mentoring Programme and allows design students at NC, HNC and HND to collaborate on a single project at the start of their academic session. The CDN event takes place on Nov 28th at the Radison Blu in Glasgow, and tutors Alex Gunn and Chris Hughes will be attending along with mentor Alan Lennon (Creative Director at Lennon Design).

DO:25 / D&AD

It's almost the end of another teaching year, so we are signing off with a great piece of work from HND students' Alistair Kerr and Hussain Al-Khirsan's D&AD Best of Year - the Open brief for the Dept. of Health. Hussain has just completed a placement at Heedi Design, and will be finishing off his degree in Graphic Design at Duncan of Jordanstone, whilst Alistair is now a junior designer at RAPP in Edinburgh. Well done guys, see you at Graduation.



The complete entry for this work, along with our other awards for 2012/13, will be on exhibit at the opening of Edinburgh's Creative Exchange, on July 11th.