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.

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.

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).

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.

Get Real 2020

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

   

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

Good News for Great Ideas

Photography by Cameron Brisbane

Graphic Design Tutor Helena Good scooped the Leadership Award at the Creative Edinburgh Awards last week, for her outstanding contribution to the Daydream Believers project, and in hugely deserved recognition of a career dedicated to design education and the Creative Industries.

The annual awards took place in the The Hub on the city’s Royal Mile, where a wealth of talent from across Edinburgh's creative community gathered to celebrate a variety of outstanding projects, initiatives, studios, individuals and ideas during the past year.

The Daydream Believers project - the Edinburgh College collaboration with industry and Secondary Schools - won the Collaboration Award for its groundbreaking programme designed to encourage creative thinking in Secondary Education and beyond, ensuring the next generation of talent can realise its ambitions.

The awards also recognised the work of two of our 2019 graduates, Edinburgh College HND Graphic Design students Joy Mooney and Natalie Loh, who were both shortlisted for the Student Award for their final project work, exhibited back in May at the Fruitmarket Gallery, and for their contributions to Daydream Believers.

Congratulations to all the winners, nominees and organisers - demonstrating yet again that the Creative Industries in Scotland is in good hands moving forward into the future.

More about Creative Edinburgh.

Our newest YCN Winners!

Earlier this week Tutors Alex Gunn and Richie Bisset accompanied our Commended YCN students down to London for the annual YCN Student Awards.  Our winners from HN Graphics were Anne Bender, Ben Neilson, David Symmons (Gumtree brief), Sean  Gordon (Hostelworld brief) and from HN UX Design, Agnieska Koundourakis (Energy Saving Trust brief). Well done all (and here's the full list of commendees).

This year the ceremony was held in Toynbee Hall in East London, and featured a keynote talk by Pentagram's Astrid Stavro.

These commendations get more difficult to win each year as the competition gets larger, with 1000s of entries from UK and International Universities and Arts Schools for some of the more popular briefs.  Since 2008 our Graphics course has now racked up 18 of these wins so the pressure is on to repeat our success in 2020.




Sean, Ben and David.



Agnieska and Anne.

Pics by Richie, nice work.

YCN Quartet

YCN have announced their commended students for 2018/2019, and Edinburgh College have garnered no less than six awards - including a stunning haul of 4 commendations for our Graphic Design students.

HNC Graphic Design students Anne Bender, Ben Neilson and David Symmons all won for their submissions to the Gumtree brief, whilst their classmate Sean Gordon was amongst the winners for his work on the Hostelworld brief.  Congratulations also to HNC UX Design student Agneszka Koundourakis (Energy Saving Trust), and Emma Pye (Gumtree). Well done all!

 We've had many multiple winning years at YCN, but this is the first time we have not entered any team submissions, so each individual win is extra special.  We'll be taking our winners down to London in September for the YCN Awards Ceremony at the Barbican.

Full results are on the New Now YCN website.

Moving Stories

Our annual end-of-year Industry Event and Show takes place this year on June 5th at the Fruitmarket Gallery.  We last exhibited there in 2016 and this year the event includes the use of both floors, exhibiting projects from HND Graphic Design, and showcasing the work of the Daydream Believers Schools project.

We'll be hoping for another full house to help us celebrate design education, with attendees from education and industry, as well as parents and friends eager to see the work of the Class of 2019.







This year all our artwork and promotion was done by the hugely talent Balasz Hirth, currently studying in our HNC class.  You can book free tickets on Eventbrite.

Daydream Believers

The Daydream Believers programme, founded by Graphic tutor Helena Good,  is aimed at secondary school pupils to help them develop essential skills necessary for the future ahead. Working closely together with Employers, Teachers, Lecturers and Student Ambassadors, the initiative is testing a new pilot programme that engages pupils with creative experiments and promotes critical thinking, and problem-solving. Here's a short film introducing the programme, and more info here.

Berlin Letterpress Experience

As part of our annual study trip to Berlin, we booked the Year One Graphics class on a visit to P98a - Erik Spiekermann's fantastic Letterpress studio located on Potsdamer Strasse in central Berlin.

Spiekermann set up this studio primarily to work on personal projects and exploring how letterpress type  can be redefined and used in the 21st century. The studio is equipped with a number of Korrex letterpress machines and Heidelberg Windmill press as well as a modern Riso printer.

The studio also designs and cuts its own wooden letterpress type.

Director Ferdinand Ulrich  explained how the studio operates, demonstrated setting up the machines, and showed the class samples from Erik Spikermann's collections - including font specimen books from the early 1900s, and more than 500 cases of poster type, mostly made from wood.

Ferdinand's colleague Lunia  D'Ambrosino also explained how she had applied for an internship at P98a having graduated with a Bachelors degree in Visual Communication.


Typesetting a poster on the Korrex.


Editorial piece printed via Letterpress


Erik Spiekermann's signature quote, letterpress A1 posterzine.


Ferdinald Ulrich talking to the class.


Find out more about P98a on their website, and visit if you happen to be in Berlin.

Espresso Loves Colour

Our NC Graphics class kicked off 2019 by presenting their packaging project.  We run this project each year, and some of the Units integrated in this work include Colour, Introduction to Typography, Digital Media, and Sketchbooks.  So a lot of new skills are on display, backed by solid research into the client and the product market. It always makes for an interesting project, and the deliverables need to include one completed physical example of their packaging idea.

For this brief the class looked at Union Coffee's espresso blend range. The aim wasn't to rebrand the company (Union Coffee was rebranded in 2015 by Studio Output), but to look at improving the profile of the espresso range at point-of-sale and in displays, specifically in supermarkets rather than the higher end retail outlets they were more comfortable in.

One standout, and a good yardstick for the quality which this class is showing, came from Bethany Carrick, whose concept merged geographical locations with bold colours, abstract patterns, and some clean, delicate typography to create a vibrant set of boxed products capturing the essence of the four blended flavours on offer.

Pure Joy

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.

DMA Breakthrough Finalists

Huge congratulations to Blanca Jiminez, Natasha Ryan and Joy Mooney who have all been announced as finalists for the DMA Breakthrough Award for their work on the Direct Line brief.

The three final year students will be travelling down to London during the first week in December, along with tutor Helena Good, to pitch their idea to the DMA panel, and then attend the awards night on Dec 4th!

Into Orbit

HND Year 2 recently finished a short poster project set by former graduates Kyle McPartlin and Kiera Winfield, both designers at Edinburgh agency Orbit.

They set a brief to explore the word 'collaboration', and the class were tasked with each designing a single A3 poster using the risograph process. We exhibited the work in the hub and also invited along Johnny Gailey, who runs Out of the Blueprint studio in Leith, and specialise in riso printing and facilitated the production of the work.

Kyle and Kiera are due to announce a winner of the project next week, and that will guarantee one talented student a placement at Orbit.  Some sample risos from the project -

Class of 2018

Lovely film by 2018 graduate Natkritta Chanmee, which she filmed over the course of her final year at Edinburgh College.

YCN At The Barbican

Earlier this week we attended the YCN Awards in London to see five Edinburgh College students (four from Graphic  Design and one from User Experience Design) receive YCN Commendations.

YCN has been going now since 2001,  and we have been regularly attending the awards since 2008. This year Director Nick Defty introduced the ceremony at the Barbican with a nice summary of the YCN ethos, its aims and achievements since its inception. He talked about some of the challenges currently faced by the Creative Industries, and also the opportunities encouraged by YCN, things like collaboration, fresh ideas and inclusion.

This year there were three guest speakers - Ciara Phelan and Dorcas Brown from Grand Matter,  Anna Carpen, Creative Director at And Rising, and James Greenfield, the co-founder of Koto.  As always these speakers were tasked with providing words of wisdom and advice to the YCN Commendees, and their efforts were insightful, amusing and hugely appreciated.  James Greenfield in particular stuck a great note when he advised all creative students to try and eliminate worry from their work, and just get on which developing great ideas.

HND Graphics students Iain Waugh, Kit Lawson and Kryz Wajand produced winning entries for Dogs Trust, Art Fund and British Gymnastics respectively, with Natasha Ryan and Sophie McKinlay (from the HND UXD course) commended for the Action on Hearing Loss brief. All received a wonderful YCN wooden block this year, designed by Tom Forsyth.

Since 2009 the HN Graphics course has amassed no less that 19 YCNs, a formidable feat competing against Art Schools and Universities across the UK and Europe.

Its become a tradition on these visits to the YCN Awards to catch up with any former graduates who are now working in London, and this year we met up with 2015 Graduate Olga Kominek, who went on to study Graphic Design at Glasgow School of Art, graduating this year with a 1st BA(Hons). Olga is now working as an intern with design and fashion magazine Wallpaper*. You can check out her work over on behance.




Kryz, Kit and Natasha at the YCN reception.


Iain Waugh, Natasha Ryan, and Tutor Alex Gunn


YCN solid wooden blocks


Kit Lawson gets on stage at the Barbican.

Another Big Star

Niamh picks up her award from Union's Creative Director Sheryl Thompson (right) and host Danni Menzies.

To round off a bumper year, the course is celebrating another win at the Marketing Society Scotland Star Awards, with HND student Niamh Curran picking up Star Creative Student accolade for her work on the STV brief, sponsored by the Union.

This project is unique on the course because the initial response is a written submission, and the shortlisted candidates then pitch their developed idea to the judging panel. Niamh held off competition from talented creative students at Robert Gordon's and DJCAD, and our students have now won this award in no less than six times in the last seven years.

An extra bonus this year was that 2017 graduate Christina Giannakou, now a designer at AlwaysBeContent, was shortlisted in the Rising Creative Star category, a great achievement so early in her career.

Now in its fourteenth year, the Star Awards brings together the largest gathering of the marketing and advertising community outside of London.  This year, some 500 practitioners, clients and creatives celebrated at the Corn Exchange in Edinburgh.  The full list of winners can be found here.

Samples from Niamh's submission -

Showing Off At Show 2018

Great short film of our recent Industry Night & Show at the Dovecot in central Edinburgh.