Miles Ahead

Here's an interesting project by NC Graphics student Pavils Vorobjuvos, for his digital project, combining web design, storytelling and art direction.  The brief was to select a title from the Bloomsbury 33 & 1/3 book series about seminal or famous albums, and to design a one page website telling the story of the title.

Pavils chose 'Bitches Brew', the ground-breaking jazz-rock fusion by Miles Davis, released in March 1970.

Pavils' process involved researching the artist, era, music and context for the title, and then thumbnail sketching out the narrative order of the content.  The visuals were then developed as a wireframe and visual mockup using Illustrator and Photoshop.  Pavils also used InVision to assemble an assets board and set up a prototype scrolling page.

The concept cleverly captures the expansive experimental feel of the music and celebrates the awesome typography associated with the album's famous cover art, by painter Mati Klarwein.

The typography on the cover is set in Novel Gothic, a font designed by ATF in the 1920's, for which no faithful digitisation currently exists. Pavils did some tweaking on a freely available substitute and the final results look pretty authentic.

Good Work : BIMA100

Great news earlier this month for Graphic Design lecturer Helena Good who was named in the annual BIMA 100.  Helena was listed in the Talent Champion category for her pioneering work on the Engaging Schools project 'Daydream Believers'.

Helena attended the BIMA ceremony in London, and also bumped into one of our mentors, Gregor Matheson, who made the list in the Rising Stars category for his work as Design Director at Tayburn.
BIMA - the British Interactive Media Association - is a not-for-profit industry body representing the digital industry across the UK. The BIMA 100 list celebrates the people who are shaping the British digital industry.

Check the full list of BIMA 100 2018 and rad this BIMA blogpost about Daydream Believers.

Visit Scotland / Whitespace

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.

 

12 X 80s

The last project hand-in before the Easter break for the HNC Graphics class was '12 X 80s" - where they had to select an album recorded between 1980 and 1989, and tell its story in a single page website. Artists selected included Grace Jones, the Human League, David Bowie, U2, AC/DC, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Queen, Whitney Houston, ABBA, Kraftwerk, Michael Jackson, Hall & Oates and John Lennon.

You can check out some of the projects on our pinterest board, and here are three sample landing pages we really loved -

 
Bowie / Scary Monsters, Super Creeps (1980) - Paulina Wasik




Jesus & Mary Chain / Psychocandy (1985) - Aga Pomaranska




Queen / Hot Space (1981) - Lena Sakura

Visiting Edenspiekermann

As part of our Berlin trip this year, we were really excited and very fortunate to visit Edenspiekermann.  For many designers, Edenspiekermann is best known for its work with Monotype's FontShop. The agency motto is 'Design is in our DNA'.

Based in Potsdamer Strasse in central Berlin, the agency specialises in digital products, branding and service design, and is the result of a merger in 2009 between Spiekermann Partners (founded by the typographer Erik Spiekermann), and Dutch design agency Eden.

Martin Stadler

Director of Brand Consulting Martin Stadler kicked off the afternoon with a great talk to our 32 students. His presentation focussed on a recent project - HIAG Data - which featured a new brand identity, bespoke typeface design, and an innovative web design for a Swiss-based data hosting company.


Martin Stadler talking about the brand experience.

Martin explained Edenspiekermann's approach to branding as having four key elements - storytelling, brand experience, design & identity, and development.  He discussed how the agency worked with HIAG during the research phase, and the way that this led to the development of a 'visual language' for the brand which the client could be directly involved in.

As well as going into great detail about the art direction and storytelling concept behind the project, Martin showed the students how the design ideas developed and were improved or rejected, including many iterations of the typeface and the screen designs which didn't make it into the final product.

"We see failure as something that's necessary because it drives you to the right solution." -  Martin Stadler

Bastian Boss

Martin's colleague Bastian Boss was up next, to talk about his area of expertise, Service Design.  He gave some great examples of how research is key to this emerging area of design. and how Edenspiekermann use the technique of 'cultural probes' to collect the key insights into how users experience a given service or product. A big part of process was analysing the design impact that the work had upon the end users.

"Things are changing fast in Service Design, so for sure, we are continually adapting our tools and methods." -  Bastian Boss

Bastian presented a case study for NS Pro Rail (Nederlandse Spoorwegen, the Dutch national railway) which tackled the signage and experience issues we all associate with waiting for, and boarding, trains.  You can read more about Bastian's approach to Service Design in a great article he wrote about it here.


Bastian explaining his approach to Service Design.

Internships

There was also an added bonus with the introduction of Julian Thiel, a design student, who talked about his experiences on a three-month internship at the agency. Julian explained that although a high level of work was demanded of him, the ability to fit into a team and to be able to tackle a wide range of different design challenges, were really important. In return for this level of commitment, Edenspiekermann generously pays its interns at double the standard rate in Berlin.

"One of the main things I've learned here is to argue for your design decisions." - Julian Thiel

After the talks our hosts held a great Q&A and covered everything from applying for an internship, customising your portfolio,  to the continuous skills development necessary these days in design, to the benefits of working in collaborative multi-disciplined (and often multi-cultural) teams.  This was a fantastic experience for the students and a great example of how industry can support and help develop design education.



The Edenspiekermann Berlin Kitchen Experience!


Martin offers up some words of wisdom after the talk.


Design Tutors Alex Gunn (l) and Chris Hughes (r) with Martin Stadler.


More:
HIAG Data case study
NS Pro Rail case study

#berlin 17 Transmediale

Transmediale is Europe’s premiere festival of digital arts, culture and technology. Each year the programme features cutting-edge films, installations, performances, workshops, and other events at the impressive Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in central Berlin.

This year Transmediale celebrates its 30th anniversary, and we attended the opening night on Thursday where more than 1000 students, artists, technologists, educators and designers gathered from all over the globe to celebrate digital culture and creative collaboration.

All the workshops, exhibits and activities centred on theme of 'ever elusive' - the geopolitical turbulence in the modern world, the redundancy of data, and and our reactions to it through audio-visual media.

Highlights of the opening night included a performance by Black Quantum Futurist Collective, a DJ set by James Ferrano, a stand showing a selection of Transmediale's published work since 1987 - magazines, programmes, manifestos and catalogues - and some stunning and original installations as part of the 'alien matter' exhibition.




Transmediale 30 years of printed matter.



Joep Van Liefland 'Video Palace #44' - This exhibit deals with plastic waste and the redundancy of complex data, and consists of a huge sculpture - an enclosed  wall - made entirely of some 20,000 VHS videotapes.



Addie Wagenkecht - xxxx.xxx - a sculpture consisting of five circuit boards and hundreds of flashing green lights connected by a series of Ethernet cables. The circuit boards tap into data streams on nearby Wi-Fi spots and analyse them, resulting in a continuous blinking pattern of the lights - every blink indicating the process at work.  This looked particularly striking in the exhibition environment - pitch darkness.

Transmediale also runs in conjunction with the CTM Festival of experimental sound, with events held at world-famous clubs such as Berghain and Tresor.

More:
Transmediale website
CTM Festival website

#berlin15 - Transmediale

As part of our annual study trip to Berlin, we attend Transmediale, Europe’s premiere festival of digital arts, culture and technology. Each year the programme features cutting-edge films, installations, performances, workshops, and other events at the impressive Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures) in central Berlin.



This year the theme at Transmediale was 'Capture All' - focussing on how we create, use, share and interpret digital media in all of its forms and how this is affecting our lives. The festival opened on Wednesday 28th with more than 1000 students, artists, technologists, educators and designers attending from all over the globe. As well as free access to the full festive exhibition and free wine, DJ Renaissance Man put on a two hour set running till 11pm as attendees networked and soaked up the atmosphere.

In past years Transmediale has tended to feature a lot of conceptual digital art, virtual interaction and installation work, so it was great for our design students to see what felt like a much more tangible exhibition this year, containing some stunning and original visual communication via print, screen and video, including the following highlights -

Main Exhibition : Jennifer Lyn Morone

In this standout piece, the artist turned herself into a real corporation called Jennifer Lyn Morone™, Inc.  As a commercial venture, she presents herself and her belongings as items in which you can buy shares.  In this way, as a direct attack on the culture of data-mining,  digital marketing and social media, none of her personal data can be shared, stored or accessed unless the viewer actually owns it. Morone explains this idea in a cool video, alongside documents detailing the incorporation, plus the terms and conditions of her personal data market. There's also an iPad App where you can select and purchase Morone's email, mood, and location data, amongst other personal information. Check out more about the project on the web at jenniferlynmorone.com

Main Exhibition : Networked Optimization

A collaboration by Silvio Lorusso and Sebastian Schmieg, this work uses digital publishing and access to reading materials to examine data interaction. The work presents a series of three crowdsourced versions of popular self-help books — The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, The 5 Love Languages, and How to Win Friends and Influence People. The books are displayed on a glass table for reading, but when you pick one up and flick through it, almost all of the pages are empty. The cover artwork for each title is also devoid of text.



The only text that remains readable is a selection of popular highlights - passages which were underlined by Kindle users – together with the tally of highlighters who have read each title. Each time a passage is underlined, it is automatically stored by Amazon. The e-books can be downloaded, and paper copies are also available in the HKM bookshop.

Guest Exhibition : Ellie Harrison

For almost five years Glasgow-based artist Ellie Harrison recorded information about every aspect of her daily routine.  The result was a spectacular piece of work called 'Timelines', which documents everything she did, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for four weeks.

Each day the data about every activity was transferred into an excel spreadsheet. By the end of the four weeks it contained 2,297 entries, which were then transposed into a series of 28 colour-coded timelines.  This produced a dazzling infographic which allows the viewer to identify any activity from the artist's life, including eating, showering, commuting to work, buying food, using email, driving, socialising and so on.

Foyer Programme : Datafied Research

This panel-led event discussed the findings of a year-long project exploring Transmediale's theme of 'Capture All', and looked at issues surrounding the limits to how much personal information about us can or should be digitised. The panel featured participants from the Datafied Research PhD workshop between Aarhus University and the School of Creative Media, Hong Kong City University. The results were also published as a peer-reviewed newspaper, which was launched at the festival and exhibited in the foyer. All the double-page spreads were hung up in a flatplan sequence to create a huge single image as a landscape poster. On the other side of this, all of the findings, statistics and related articles, beautifully typeset, were there to read. We managed to pick up a few copies of this nice editorial product for the studio.

Foyer Programme : Hybrid Publishing Toolkit

This workshop, held on Friday, was part of the Digital Publishing Toolkit research project, and featured a presentation by Florian Cramer, Patricia de Vries, Miriam Rasch and Margreet Riphagen, who described a set of tools for digital publishing. The Toolkit, available as an e-book, is aimed at anyone working in art and design publishing, providing hands-on practical advice and focusing on working solutions for low-budget, small-edition publishing.  Approaches for the use of the toolkit can include catalogues, magazines, research publications, and design or art-themed books. More can be found at the networkcultures.org, including a free download of the e-book.

Transmediale also runs in conjunction with the CTM Festival of experimental sound, with events held at world-famous clubs such as Berghain and Tresor.

More:
Transmediale flickr stream
Transmediale facebook page
Transmediale website
CTM Festival website

Re-imagining The FACE

It's a tradition on our HND course to set the editorial project during October, and for the last couple of years we've concentrated on digital publishing.  This year the brief was to design a contemporary treatment for a relaunch of the FACE, the seminal 80s/90s culture magazine created by Nick Logan and designed by Neville Brody.

The assessment criteria for the project combined typography, art direction, user experience and digital imaging, plus a strong concept behind the styling, theme and tone which would meet the client requirements - a big challenge given the iconic provenance of the title.


Saulius Stebulis



Dan Plunkett


As well as a new masthead and cover, each student had to design a range of articles featuring interactive content such as animation, audio, video and kinetic type.  The work was then published using Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite for the iPad. The results look a little bit like this -


Sarah Diver-Lang - The FACE 


Alasdair Muir - The FACE 



Zsusi Slezak - The FACE 



Simon Griffiths - The FACE 

You can check out a selection of the covers on our Pinterest boards.  The full set of designs are published to the Adobe cloud and each student can share their publication on request.

Design Success at the Scottish Digital Awards

Jordan(left) and Mark receive their award from Metadigital Director John MacFarlane. Pic @Herald DBA.

We're celebrating a second national award in the space of week after three of our 2014 graduates lifted the student award at the 2014 Herald Scottish Digital Business Awards last night.

The event, held in Glasgow's Grand Central Hotel, gathered together more than 250 industry professionals as the industry recognised commercial success across Scotland in digital technologies and strategies. The evening was hosted by BBC Scotland's Catriona Shearer and featured talks from Mike Neilson (Head of Digital for the Scottish Government) and John Maxwell Hobbs (Head of Digital at BBC Scotland).

The student award, sponsored by metadigital, went jointly to our HND Visual Communication graduates Ryan Allan, Mark Phillips and Jordan Pollock for their Lockdown campaign at The Royal Albert Hall, a YCN project which "impressed the judges with its innovative, creative and distinctive branding."

This year the awards had a record entry, and the other shortlisted teams in the category came from Glasgow Caledonian University and Glasgow University.  Tutors Helena Good and Chris Hughes were there to celebrate the occasion, but unfortunately one of the winning trio, Ryan Allan, was on holiday in Tenerife. Thankfully, social media meant that he didn't have to wait long to find out the result!  The other shortlisted teams in the category came from Glasgow Caledonian University and Glasgow University.

David Craik, Partner at Bright Solutions and a judge on the panel, commented "This was an outstanding submission. It's unusual to see such strong conceptual work as well as a professional level of execution from such young designers."

We had some extra news to celebrate on the night as digital professional of the year award went to Scott Walker, of Edinburgh agency LEWIS, one of our longest serving mentoring agencies and supporters of the course.

- Full list of winners and gallery at the Digital Awards website
- Check out some of the visuals from the Lockdown submission here
- Read a report of the awards night in the Glasgow Herald

Herald Scottish Digital Business Awards

We're only a few weeks into the new session but we are already celebrating an award nomination. HND Graphic Design students Ryan Allan, Mark Phillips and Jordan Pollock, who graduated today at the Usher Hall in the College's annual ceremony, have had an entry shortlisted at the prestigious Herald Scottish Digital Business Awards, in the Student category.

Back in July, towards the end of their studies, the trio submitted 'Lockdown', a YCN project to encourage donations to the Royal Albert Hall.  The solution was an experimental guerilla campaign and event promotion, featuring some striking visual styling, an original events-driven idea, and some awesome UX design.



Lockdown promo visual

All three graduates have already successfully entered industry - Mark is currently working at Blonde Digital,  Jordan is a junior designer at Whitespace, and Ryan is a graphic designer at Mywebcare.  You can check out their Lockdown project sampler here.

About the Awards
Launched in 2009, the awards recognise the success of businesses large and small across Scotland producing commercial and creative work in digital technologies, design and media channels.

The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on Thursday, October 23, 2014 at the Grand Central Hotel, Glasgow when Scotland’s most innovative businesses will come together in celebration of their achievements, so good luck to the guys.

Start Me Up

We're just about there with the induction planning for the start of the 2014-2015 session. Our induction programme picked up an award last year at the College Development Network (for Innovation in Learning and Teaching), so we hopefully know a thing or two about putting together a memorable first week for our design students.

This year the HNC and HND groups will have a week-long collaborative project involving some hand-on screen-printing, whilst the NC group will visit a major art exhibition in Edinburgh and then use that as inspiration to explore the basics of visual communication, and produce a presentation. The NC group will also be issued with this extensive bursary pack, which includes A3 sketchbooks, a bunch of essential pieces of stationary, a cutting board, notebooks, and a couple of excellent large format design books, including Steven Heller's '100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design'.

The starting dates for induction week are:
NC - Monday 25th, 9.30am in Studio R310
HNC - Monday 25th, 1pm in Studio R310
HND - Tuesday 26th, 9am in Studio R310

Lockdown

One of the most experimental projects from our HND this year came from a team effort by Ryan Allan, Mark Phillips and Jordan Pollock, whose 'Lockdown' solution to the Royal Albert Hall brief for YCN cleverly integrated branding, digital and advertising into a dynamic and unusual event campaign. The general premise was a guerilla-style takeover of high-profile music performances and - well, see for yourself and decide -

Future Travel

Motion Graphics have become an increasingly important aspect of visual communication, and are now a regular feature of project-work on the HND Graphic Design course. The example here, by HND student Emils Blooms-Blumanis, demonstrates how versatile the medium can be as part of the design process.

Earlier this year Emils completed a work placement at Skyscanner, working alongside former Edinburgh Telford design graduate James Ferguson, who is Head of Design for the Edinburgh-based travel comparison specialists.  One task Emils was asked to do was to mock up a proposed design for a forthcoming Skyscanner project 'Future Travel' - a website showcasing Skyscanner's vision of the travel industry in a decade's time, 2024.  Using illustration, SVG graphics and wireframing, Emils put together this inventive demo in Adobe AfterEffects to simulate parallax scrolling for the website.



Using the demo as a guide, the Skyscanner team then set about developing the idea into a real product, and you can check out the remarkable results on the actual site, which Skyscanner launched recently at http://www.skyscanner2024.com/

Emils, a YCN winner in 2013, is currently working part-time at The Union, and his work will be on display at our Graduate Industry Night and Show at Creative Exchange on Thursday 29th May. More details can be found at www.etcshow.net. You can also get a sneak preview of work from the Class of 2014 on our Pinterest boards.

Experience @ Creative Exchange

Our HND Final Year Interactive Design students have an exhibition of their work showing at Creative Exchange, which will  run for the next three weeks.  An opening event takes place on Friday 7th March, from 6-8PM.

The opening will a chance for participating students, friends, family, tutors and invited design professionals to view 14 examples of digital design work in response to briefs set via the YCN Awards 2014. The course won two commendations last year at YCN, both for Experian, and this year the class have tackled the following briefs :
 
      Morrisons Supermarket – Design a new in-store experience
      Dominoes Pizza – Reclaim 2-for-Tuesday
      Lawn Tennis Association - Encourage 17-25 yr olds to play tennis

The show is called 'Experience' - reflecting how all of the solutions are concerned with the user experience, including digital interfaces, virtual reality and social media.

Poster by Jen Pearce, HND Interactive Design

From print to digital : Magazine design

Emil Bloom and Byron Abbot produced a series of quirky fashion articles for their editorial project. The samples posted here show the layout for print, plus a short video clip of the user journey through the digital version. Their combination of vertical and horizontal scrolling fits the content nicely to create a really engaging flow through the articles.

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.

Vinyl / Digital

Alongside their YCN and D&AD projects, our HNC group have been working on an interesting digital project. The class were asked to pick a famous 12" record sleeve, designed pre-1990, and to tell the story of the record and its design in a single scrolling webpage.

As luck would have it, the project coincided with a visit to Edinburgh by legendary sleeve designer Vaughan Oliver, who talked at the recent LongLunch event. A good number of the class turned up to see him talk about his seminal work for 4AD, and this provided plenty of creative inspiration. No-one actually chose a VO cover, but the range of selections included classic album artwork from David Bowie, Pattie Smith,and the Rolling Stones, through to the Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Blondie, Nirvana, Dela Soul, Meatloaf and not unsurprisingly, Pink Floyd.

We'll be inviting industry mentor Alan Lennon in to view the final designs sometime very soon, but in the meantime here is a sneak preview from the work of Emil Bloom, who chose the Beatles White album, and produced a fully responsive storyboard combining some nice typography and illustration.





You can also view the webpage.

A Busy New Year

Our Final Year students have started 2013 in top gear, tackling a live digital brief and starting their D&AD projects. They are also getting set to go out on work experience in February. We've had a great response from all of our favourite agencies, and the students will start their placements on or after Jan 28th.

The HNC group submitted their packaging projects this week - a choice between the Goji brief for YCN, and a brief to reinvent the inflight experience on BMI's European business flights. A selection of the YCN work will be posted soon, in the meantime here is snippet from Ryan Allan's BMI solution - a fingerprint-activated check-in planner App -

Pure Editorial DPS

On Friday our final year class presented their Pure Editorial projects. The brief was to create a masthead, cover and three articles for a chosen subject under the theme of 'pure'. Subjects included economics, politics, the arts, exhibitions, food, travel, technology and families.

For this project, our students worked in collaboration with their counterparts in HND Photography, and the work was designed to be published to tablet format.

We previously posted a sneak preview of work by Michal Grazewicz, and now we've put together a gallery of selections from ten of the resulting folios. A 'folio' in this context is a collection of articles, assembled into a single file using InDesign's Folio Builder, and published using Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite. Check the sample work out here.

Pure Preview

The Final Year students are busy preparing their portfolios and work samples for tomorrow night's review event, but they also have a big deadline for the end of the week - their tablet editorial designs.

The format and workflow for this project uses the InDesign CS6 Folio Builder and Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite, which is great news for their future prospects and should make for some exciting presentations on Friday. As a taster, here's a sneak preview of 'Pure Exhibitions', by Michal Grazewicz, featuring his masthead, cover and contents pages, plus two articles.