HND Graphic Design student Joy Mooney took the Breakthrough Award at the DMA awards recently in London. The DMA Breakthrough Awards runs in partnership with the DMA Awards and GRT.
This year, Direct Line supplied the brief, which was to re-position Direct Line to a younger target audience for new car insurance by building awareness of the brand and increasing understanding of 'black box' insurance.
We managed to produce all three finalists with Joy being joined by Natasha Ryan and Blanca Jiminez.
All three travelled down to London with tutor Helena Good to pitch their ideas to the judging panel, ahead of attending the Awards. Joy took the top prize but Natasha and Blanca shared the joint Silver prize - a huge achievement all round for our student creatives.
Check out the promotional video for our One Week project from spring 2017. This collaboration involved award-winning design agency Whitespace, and their client, Visit Scotland.
Final Year student Jeff Gillan has won a Commendation from YCN for his creative solution to the Cornetto brief. Jeff's concept 'Snap, Share and Scoop' features some playful copy and a nice user experience. Check out the full submission on Jeff's Behance
Jeff can now look forward to a trip to London in September for the annual YCN Awards, alongside classmate Ildiko Rohonka who won a commendation for her solution to the Quorn brief, which you can also view on her Behance. Well done guys!
Two of our NC design students - Aga Pomaranska and Kyle Lamond - recently picked up an award in a national competition set by the Sleep Council - an organisation funded by bed manufacturers to promote the importance of a good night's sleep.
The brief was to create a campaign to help increase general awareness of the need for good sleep, and the key message from the client was to 'get eight hours of sleep and love the feeling of being rested, focused, happier & healthier'. The target audience was 18-25 / all genders - the biggest consumers of smartphone technology, which evidence suggests affects the brain’s ability to produce melatonin, the chemical that regulates sleep.
Aga and Kyle took a bold typographic approach, and combined Frutiger and Din Pro, set in the style of text speak, to make their copy catchy and easy to remember. They also directed and shot their own photography. For more details on the competition, and some nice quotes, check out the press release on the Edinburgh College website.
On Wednesday our graphic design students were briefed on the latest 'One Week' project, which runs next week, from Monday 16th to Friday 20th March. The group attended a briefing by the client Innis and Gunn - Scotland's leading export beer brand - at their Headquarters in Randolph Place, Edinburgh. The students were accompanied by tutors Helena Good and Alex Gunn, plus mentors from the six agencies involved on this project - Whitespace (who generously offered us the project on behalf of the client), The Gate Worldwide, Multiply, Lewis, Realise and Blonde.
We'll be documenting the project via our Storify and participants can contribute with the hashtag #oneweek6. The One Week project is part of our award-winning experiential employer-engagement Mentoring Programme, where our students collaborate in teams, working alongside various creative agencies for a full week. Our most recent One Week project was for G.F. Smith (November 2014).
HNC Graphic Design recently presented their rebranding project - a brief to reinvent and reinvigorate the Matalan brand. As well as creating a new mark and producing brand guidelines, the project called for visual concepts in print and digital to communicate the new direction the brand was being taken in. You can see a range of sample visuals on our pinterest board, and here are a few tasters that showcase the variety of ideas the project produced.
Olga Komineck combined clever copy with elegant typography and a hint of Americana to create a fresh change of direction for the brand -
Kiera Winfield looked to Google's Material Design guidelines to develop a vibrant colour palette for her intriguing and minimalist '*there is more to Matalan' concept -
Another direction came from Annabel Gibb, whose 'restyle yourself' concept combined a handwritten font with a bold circular red mark providing plenty of energy and a broad appeal.
On our first full day in Berlin, Alex and I took a large group of design students to visit M&C Saatchi - with 22 offices worldwide, the biggest independent advertising agency in the world. The visit was very kindly arranged by Viktorija Kravkova, an Art Director at the agency and one of our former students who graduated from the HND course in 2012. Viktorija previously worked at Landor in Hamburg before joining M&C Saatchi Berlin in February 2014.
The visit kicked off with an hour-long talk in the meeting room by Björn Bremer, the Chief Creative Director (who also teaches advertising at the University of Berlin). He talked a little bit about the history of the company, and gave the group an overview of the client roster, which includes massive brands like Coca Cola, BASF, Siemens and Bayer Leverkusen.
Sample goodies from Saatchi's recent work.
Just waiting for the Creative Director to arrive.
To introduce the sort of work M&C Saatchi produces, Björn played a showreel video of the agency's Euro Effie Gold award-winning 'Nothing Compares to Havana' campaign for another big brand, Havana Club. This campaign was rolled out globally across 35 markets and exemplifies the creative approach that the agency is famous for - brutal simplicity - and reflects their commercial ethos that "the work is nothing until it goes out the door".
Björn also discussed creativity, the realities of working with clients, and gave out five pieces of excellent advice -
1. Make Mistakes.
2. Have An Idol - seek inspiration from your heroes or idols.
3. Photoshop Sucks - the software is just a set of tools, start with the idea.
4. Don't Covet Your Ideas - share them, kill them, accept criticism.
5. Work Harder - you have to put in the hours to get good at what you do.
On the final point, Bjorn referred to Malcolm Gladwell's book 'Outliers' which describes the '10,000 hours rule' for mastering any discipline.
A short Q&A followed which gave the group an insight into how to plan their careers, where to look for work, why presenting work is so important, the pitfalls of research (including the short story slide shown below), and how students should (and should not) present their portfolios and any speculative communication to an agency.
The limits of design research.
Finally, we got a short tour of the offices, which are located on Münzstrasse in the Mitte district, a mere 10 minute walk from our hotel and set across two floors, with the 40-strong creative team on the upper floor. Huge thanks to Viktorija, Björn and all at M&C Saatchi for an immensely inspiring start to the study week.
HND Graphic Design final year students pitched today to Jenny Smith and Rebecca Huntley from Scottish Soapworks, an Edinburgh-based company specialising in high quality handmade soaps, bath and body products. The brief was to come up with inventive packaging and promotional ideas for the company's handmade and organically-flavoured soap collection.
The class was organised into five teams of four, and each team had input and art direction from mentors at five of Edinburgh design agencies - Lewis, Multiply, Blonde, Family and Neish. Each group was allocated 20 minutes to pitch in the studio, and then answer questions. After the presentations, the work was exhibited in the college hub, where the tutors held a reception that included interviews, a photo-shoot, product sampling, and a marketing surveys carried out by our very helpful and enthusiastic first year students. Jenny then gave detailed feedback on each presentation, and was full of praise both for the ideas and the professional approach which external clients have come to expect from our student designers.
Blonde Digital, one of the agencies involved, also popped in to see the exhibition and lend some support to the students, and we've included samples from the Blonde teams' pitch. Work from all five teams will soon be available on our pinterest boards, and the winning team will be announced next Wednesday. Their ideas will then be put into production.
Team Blonde - 'Pick n Mix' - packaging, digital, outdoor. Rachel Cameron, Craigh Roberston, Saulius Stebulis, Eweline Egbert, mentor Vicky Sinclair (Blonde Digital)
We are celebrating another piece of awards success, as HND student Andrew Palfreyman won the Star Creative Student at the annual Marketing Society Star Awards in Edinburgh last night.
This is the third consecutive win by our students in this particular award category. We had two shortlisted students, Andrew and fellow classmate Calum Mackinnon, who were competing against students from Edinburgh College of Art, Duncan of Jordanstone and Napier University. This year the client was John Lewis, and Andrew can now look forward to an internship, working in-house with the John Lewis creative team.
Andrew (centre) receiving his award.
Celebrating its tenth anniversary, and presented by Edith Bowman, the Star Awards this year brought together the largest gathering of the marketing and advertising community outside of London - some 500 practitioners, clients and creatives. The full list of winners can be found here.
The print invites go out today for our Industry Night & Show, being held on May 29th at Creative Exchange in Leith. The campaign concept came from
HNC students Saulius Strebulis, Adriana Matecka and Dan Plunkett, with Art Direction from one of our longest-serving mentors Alan Lennon of Lennon Design.
We've had a fantastic response so far, with well over 120 industry professionals and designers saying 'yes' via our online invite form at www.etcshow.net. Every one of those nice people will get a couple of these print invites through the door over the next couple of days. We're still expecting a flurry of extra attendees, and if you are amongst them, you'll be able to pick up the invites on the night at the reception!
Samples from two nice hand-ins from the NC Major Project, featuring branding and campaign ideas for the Airline brief. This brief was to name, brand and promote a new Scottish Air Carrier, assuming a 'YES' result in the Independence Referendum being held on Sept 18th.
Jason Craig and Wendy Harris Jones from Cutty Sark announced the winning solution to the One Week project today in the design studio at Edinburgh College (Granton Campus). Their feedback was thorough, and the assessment criteria covered -
a) understanding the brief
b) effective strategy
c) working as a team
d) creative and original thinking
and they agreed that Team Neish, led by HND student Calum Mackinnon and mentored by Graham Neish, were the winners. The runners-up spot went to Team Multiply, led by Mark Phillips and mentored by Multiply's Charlie Boyle. You can check out a sampler of all six team projects on our Pinterest boards, and the work will be on display in the college Hub until Friday, May 2nd.
The winning team - Calum Mackinnon, Craig Nicholson, Emily Hubbard, Jakub Sobanski, Saulius Strebulis and Magda Milek, have all been offered a place at the Cutty Sark table at the Marketing Society Awards in June, and the students will also be the first recipients of a new year-long graduate membership of the Marketing Society. As an additional boost to the course, Cutty Sark have also offered to sponsor our end-of-year Industry Night and Show, which will be held on May 29th at Creative Exchange in Leith.
Cutty Sark were full of praise for the standard from all the teams, but
felt that the #getawaywithit solution really stayed on brief and featured the
most original approach. The copy-based campaign played on the rebellious nature of the target audience by associating the Cutty Sark brand with the ethos of breaking rules and conventions. The idea also took into account the logical conclusion of the concept - that a real campaign would be banned by the ASA - and that this would raise the brand profile.
Jason said "Their pitch showed a strong understanding of the brief, the product and the target audience. The concept showed composure and maturity and led to danger, adventure, the unexpected, rebelliousness and basically the feeling of discomfort which was the main purpose of the brief – to push us towards areas we had not considered. This team did it very well." He added that "The reality of breaking the law is not to be applauded or rewarded, but basically putting the idea into the consumers head was very clever. It does translate and it would be able to spread internationally, and taking it into filmed live situations to post on social media was clever and feasible and would feed itself into a Phase 2 campaign."
The concept -
Tweak to the bottle cap from white to black -
Guerilla campaign - outdoor, print, social media and ambient channels
