New Show - New Talent

Our end-of-year Industry Night & Show takes place in less than two weeks, on Thursday June 1st. This year the event is at the Dovecot Studios, one of Edinburgh's best Arts spaces.  Our theme this year is 'New'- inspired by all the positive feedback we've received from our partners and collaborators out there in the industry.

As well as exhibiting the final projects by our HND Graphic Design students, the show will include work from winning competition entries for the Marketing Society Scotland and D&AD, plus samples from our recent Schools project and our Mentoring Programme live 'One Week' projects.

The show is on for one night only - a hugely successful format we've used since 2013 - and runs from 6-9PM.  You can book a place at http://new.etcshow.net

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

Inspire Schools Project

Our Schools project 'Inspire' is almost finished. We'll be holding an event on May 12th with lots of school educators attending at the College, and will publish details of this soon. In the meantime, you can check out our project page for all the updates and samples used during the project.

#oneweek Teams

Our resident photographer Derek Anderson caught up with the One Week teams midway through their project work for G.F Smith Paper. Derek visited Edinburgh agencies Story, Whitespace, Lewis and Neish, and you can check out the full set of photos on our flickr.


Team Neish l/r - Joanna Swieton, Rachel Cameron, Sarah Wilson, Jakob Sebanski


Team Story l/r - Linard Andins, Alisha Horn, Dan Plunkett, Craigh Robertson


Team Whitespace l/r - Adrianna Matecka, Ally Muir, Emily Hubbard, Simon Griffiths


Team Lewis l/r - Sarah Diver-Lang, Kris Kubicki, Saulius Stebulis, Kinga K., Steph Dalzell.

One Week #5

Our fifth 'One Week' project kicks of next Monday, and four Edinburgh based agencies - Lewis, Neish, Whitespace, and for the first time, Story - will each be taking a team of student designers into their studios for the week.

The client this year is GF Smith, the  Hull-based independent British company which has provided the creative community with quality paper since 1885.  GF Smith have sponsored our Visual Communication course in the past, (including the supply of Colorplan for our award-winning graduate show Say 2014), and the company's Specification Sales Manager Paul Scharf visited the studio today to meet the student teams, show off some samples from an amazing new line of paper, and of course set the brief.

We'll be documenting the student experience over the course of the week, and all the teams will pitch their solutions to Paul the following week.  We can't hardly wait.

Heins Sight

Michael Heins, one of our mentors and a digital designer at Lewis, popped in to the studio on Friday to talk to our HND students. Lewis has been one of the key employers we've been lucky to worth with over the past six years that the mentor programme has been running, and a number of their team are regular mentors to our final year students. Originally we'd asked Michael to come in to talk about workflow, but on the day he delivered a much broader talk called  'Things I Would Have Liked Somebody To Tell Me When I Was A Student'.


Slide - Michael I. Heins

Michael, who has studied in Bremen, Istanbul and Edinburgh’s ECA and was lucky to benefit from a wide range of great teachers such as Erik Spiekermann, focussed on the key areas around the everyday activities of a designer. A central theme running through all of the points in his talk was the concept of 'Mise-en-place', a French phrase meaning literally 'putting in place', and referring to the set up a chef uses in the kitchen - selecting and sharpening their tools and organising the workspace, ingredients and resources. Michael sees this the perfect metaphor for the various strategies a designer should employ to get organised, to be able to eliminate distractions, and to allow multi-tasking, version control and time management, so that the creative process can flow unhindered but efficiently and to a given deadline.



Slide - Michael I. Heins

After the presentation, Michael took questions and really personalised the session with honest insightful answers that the students clearly found inspirational. He also talked at length about his extra-curricular activities, which include experimental digital media art, typeface design, running, and of course cooking.

Colour Me Impressed

Today we welcomed our new NC Graphics students to the course, and after a short presentation and some course-related housekeeping, we got down to business of getting them started by issuing a 3-day project 'Colour Me Impressed'.  The idea of this project is to get our fledgling designers thinking about visual signals and emotional responses, and to look at one of the basic building blocks of visual communication, colour. They'll put together a sketchbook and an A2 mood board exploring their favourite colour.

To get everyone talking about colour, we'll be taking the class to the Fruitmarket Gallery on Tuesday morning to catch the Jim Lambie exhibition (running from 27 June – 19 October).


Zobop at the Fruitmarket Gallery. Pic by Alasdair Muir.

Lambie is one of Scotland's most important and original contemporary artists. Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2005, he uses bright colours, lines, shapes and everyday objects to create dazzling pattern-based artworks, including his most famous work 'ZOBOP', a floor-based psychedelic sculpture of continuous coloured lines of vinyl tape that can be exhibited on any floorspace with mesmerising results.

Let's hope this provides useful inspiration for the project. The class will mount their work on Thursday at 2pm in the studio corridor, then join the HN classes in the studio to celebrate the end of induction week and the start of their design education.

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

Say 2014 Event Nomination

Our 2014 graduate show, 'SAY 2014', has made the shortlist for Best Educational Event at the 2014 Scottish Event Awards - the second year running that our show has been nominated in this category at the awards.



Say 2014 was held at Creative Exchange in May, and attracted more than 150 advertising and design professionals from 58 of Edinburgh's best agencies and studios. The campaign this year was designed by HND students Saulius Strebulis, Adriana Matecka and Dan Plunkett, with art direction from one of our longest-serving mentors Alan Lennon of Lennon Design.

The judging took place in London in July, and the Scottish Event Awards will take place on Wednesday 8th October 2014 at The Marriott Hotel in Glasgow. The full list of nominations is available on the Scottish Event Awards website.

Students Talk Innovation @ 20:20 Vision

Edinburgh College hosts its first post-merger Staff Conference today at its Sighthill Campus.  The event, 20:20 Vision : Innovation for the Future, features a full programme of workshops, seminars and talks across all the disciplines and departments within the college.  The aim is to explore new ideas in innovation and development that will support educators, administrators and management to keep the institution at the forefront of modern education in Scotland. The conference is organised around six key themes:

1) Technology Innovation
2) Teaching Innovation
3) Student Innovation
4) Sustainability
5) Workplace of the Future
6) Outward Innovation

Our HND Graphic Design students will actually be delivering a session at the conference, under the Teaching Innovation theme -  'Innovative teaching: a student’s perspective'.

The students will be presenting their experiences of our SQA award-winning employer engagement strategy, which saw our HNC and HND groups working on two ground-breaking 'One Week' agency projects, with high profile clients SAMH and Cutty Sark, and a variety of experienced industry professionals from some of Edinburgh's top design agencies.

Star Creative Again

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.

Say : { 2014

Here's a short video from our recent Industry Night & Show at Creative Exchange. Big thanks to the film team of Adam Cosgrove, David McLachlan and Richard McCallister, and also to photographer Derek Anderson, whose stills will soon be available to view on flickr.

Say Something Tonight

Our Industry Night and Show tonight at Creative Exchange promises to be our biggest and most successful yet. With more than 150 Industry people representing 58 different agencies expected to attend, we are just hoping that our sponsors Cutty Sark will have supplied enough free drinks to go around.

As well as 18 HND Final projects to exhibit, we also have our 'One Week' projects to show for Cutty Sark and SAMH - two live briefs in collaboration with Edinburgh agencies like Whitespace, RAPP, Multiply and Lewis. Competition work for D&AD, YCN, ISTD and The Marketing Society Scotland will also be featured, and this year we have also installed a series of digital HD  projectors to display work on the Creative Exchange's amazing interior. If are are coming along, please use #sayshow if you are using Twitter to share the evening.

Something Worth Schering

On Thursday of last week Helena and I caught the train through to Glasgow after work to attend the latest LongLunch talk. The venue was Glasgow School of Art's new and extremely impressive Reid Building, and the speaker, introduced as the designer who needs no introduction, was Pentagram's Paula Scher.

Scher is amongst the most influential designers of the Twentieth Century, has been at the forefront of graphic design and design education for the best part of 40 years, and in her opening remarks claimed that she 'still looked good from a distance'. She then went on to deliver an engrossing and brilliant talk, taking the audience through many of her most famous projects, including the High Line, Public Theatre and the Windows 8 branding.

Scher described her career as having been through three distinct phases - a 'stylistic' period during the 70's and early 80's,  mostly involving experimental typography and postmodern pop-cultural ideas, then a 'large scale' period during the 90's (when she applied huge typographic-based murals onto buildings), and finally a socially responsible period, dominated by ergonomic signage and large-scale external and environmental visual communication. She also talked about her painting, modern technology, artistic inspiration, and the politics and economics of working at Pentagram.

It was great to see a significant number of our current and former students in the audience, and some were brave enough to ask Paula questions in the Q&A afterwards, including Emma Hart (currently a designer at Edinburgh agency STUFF), who asked what Paula's favourite typeface was and why. The answer came back as 'I think that Futura still has it. It still does look really great, even if the ascenders and descenders are a fraction too long'.

After the talk and a huge ovation, Scher signed posters and accompanied the LongLunch team, and our own group, to the CCA bar, where she chatted and posed for numerous pics and even took time to have a look over first year student Craigh Robertson's logotype design for his end-of-year project. A class act.

More:
Pentagram / The High Line
Pentagram / Public Theatre
Eye Magazine / Paula Scher interview

Employer Engagement - One Week

We previewed a new 4-minute documentary about the the course last night at 'Rewind' - our annual Graduate Review night.  This event is where we invite past graduates and mentors to catch up, look over the work of our current students, and generally celebrate our extended family of creatives and designers.

The film, shot and edited by film student Adam Cosgrove, features an interview with Multiply UK's Charlie Boyle, and documents our One Week collaborative project for Cutty Sark. 

Star Creative Shortlist

For the fourth consecutive year we're celebrating good news from the Marketing Society Scotland, who have shortlisted two of our final year design students, Calum Mackinnon and Andy Palfreyman, for the Star Creative Award 2014.   This award is in the Development category, sponsored by Union Direct, and requires students from Universities and Colleges in Scotland to submit a written proposal to a brief set by a high-profile client, in this case John Lewis. Only six entries make the shortlist, and they are then required to develop their idea and present it to the judging panel early in May, and a win this year would secure HND Graphic Design a third successive winner, after Steven Brown (2012) and Jonathan Walton (2013).

The winner is announced at the Marketing Society Star Awards, on June 12th at the Corn Exchange in Edinburgh, the annual celebration of Scotland's world-class marketing community. You can find out more about the awards, including the shortlists across all the professional categories, at the Star Awards 2014 website.

One Week Case Study : Whitespace

Our recent One Week project was a ground-breaking example of employer engagement in Design Education, where graphic design students worked on a live project in an industry environment for one week, in collaboration with six Edinburgh-based creative agencies.

The brief came from a high profile client, Cutty Sark Whisky, and the students were assembled into six creative teams, mixing up HNC and HND years.  Each team was assigned a design lead, an agency mentor, and external, real-world accommodation - two at design agencies (Whitespace and RAPP), three in Edinburgh's creative business incubator, Creative Exchange, and one in a bespoke studio in the College. The teams presented their solutions to their agency mentors on the Friday, and then pitched to Cutty Sark in the boardroom at their Edrington offices in Perth the following week.

As part of the feedback process, we caught up with mentor Charlie Bell (Design Director) and Neil Walker (Senior Creative) from one of Edinburgh's leading design agencies, Whitespace, and this is what they had to say -


What were your initial impressions of the brief?
Charlie: Jason’s (Jason Craig, the Global Brand Controller for Cutty Sark), presentation was really good at bringing the brand story to life and laying out all the facts. Initially we felt it was far too open but in fact it actually presented the teams with interesting challenges. It was a really tasty project for the students to get their teeth into.

Neil: The Brief was very open which can be a rarity and problematic when trying to 'home in' on what should actually be done - perhaps some minimum media parameters of some sort may help the students get started and be able to shape the campaign in their heads, allowing them to get on with the messaging and design of their campaign.  The brand had little in the way of public brand equity and was therefore a blank slate when it came to reinventing and communicating a tone and personality - the fact that the client wanted to push the brand so far was not only extremely rare, but a fantastic opportunity.

 

Photo : Derek Anderson 

What did you think of the format of the One Week project:
Charlie: Perfect amount of time. Good that they had a bit of time either side too.

Each team contained students from both the HNC and HND years, how did this work?
Charlie: Our group went down to 4 but actually this might have given them greater focus. The mixture of first and second years seemed to work. The first years' more than held their own. In fact they were the driving force in the team in many respects.

Neil : I agree - a nice setup to working in a real office too - working with different strengths, backgrounds, skills and experience levels.

What do you think were the benefits of working with students in this kind of format?
Charlie: There was a good structure there. They were able to bounce ideas off each other and really work as a team. And working with the agency we were able to give them deadlines that really focussed them.

Neil: Nice exposure to the pressures of working to a set time-limit to produce an ultimate piece of work for client/agency scrutiny. Also, they had to think out-of-the-box to come up with a wide variety of ideas and concepts but learning that ideas and executions must remain commercial and sell the product/concept.  This initially took some getting used to but quickly became realised and put into action. 

What were your observations of the group as they worked through the project?
Charlie: They took a while to get going. There were some interesting early ideas but they did go round in circles for a while. Dan (Daniel Plunkett, HNC Year) quickly became the voice of the group but they all seem to be contributing. Once the visuals started to come together you could see that the team had quite a nice mix of strengths.


Photo : Derek Anderson

Neil: They seemed to have a willingness and passion to take on board advice in order to turn around great work.  They were perhaps a little too polite of each other's ideas but this is expected and creative diplomacy is of course another vital skill to crack...

What did you think of the work they presented on Friday to you?
Charlie: It all came together really well. They had two really strong central ideas. And they were both very different. Which was impressive. It felt like they had really got to grips with the brand. Some of the executions needed work. There were some weaker bits of work in there (things like the merchandise where a bit superfluous). Once they got into the design detail they'd lost some of the edge to the work. The bits that might make the client uncomfortable. It became a bit safe.

Neil : Overall I think there was some very strong work/ideas/concepts.  They had to deliver in so many ways, by the Friday I felt they not only presented their concepts with confidence but learned to 'sell' them too.  I could see both campaigns working but as initial pitches - certainly with some further refinement and consideration - there would be elements that could be outstanding in the industry and gather a lot of interest for the brand. I really felt they had learned a lot by the end of the project.

Did the team work on the project after Friday and if so what did you think of the final presentation?
Charlie: The team came back on both Monday and Tuesday to build upon what they had done. It was really valuable to get feedback from the Friday presentation and they really took it on board and pushed the ideas even further.

Did you get any feedback from others within your agency who weren't directly involved in the project?
Charlie: The wider team were impressed. The other two design directors were impressed. Yep, everyone was pretty impressed. Even more so when they realised how little experience some of the students had.
 
Any other comments?
Charlie: Just that we were all very impressed with the team's resolve and dedication. And it was a lot of fun.


The team at Cutty Sark will be feeding back their final choice later this month, when all the artwork from each team will be available to view on pinterest and here on the blog.

SHOWING RACISM THE RED CARD AGAIN

NC Graphic Design students Charlie Law and Kim Louden took the train through to Glasgow last week with course tutor Alex Gunn to attend the annual Show Racism the Red Card Awards at Hampden Park, where Charlie won in the FE category and Kim was highly commended.

Each year the Red Card Scotland creative competition asks young people to come up with an inventive way of promoting the core messages of anti-racism and anti-sectarianism. This was the 10th awards ceremony to be held at Hampden Park, and over 4,500 young people from schools and colleges across Scotland took part in this year's competition. The judges were Craig Brown (ex Scotland Manager)Denise O’Sullivan and Ella Stephen (Glasgow City FC), Liam Craig (Captain of Hibernian FC),Veronica Rankin (former EIS Equality Officer and Red Card Supported), William McIlvanny (Novelist and Writer Against Racism) and Yvonne Donald from Education Scotland.

Charlie's success means that we've managed to produce a winner in each of the past five years at SRRC, and as well as the prospect of his design work being used across Scotland in 2014/2015, Charlie managed to get his hands on a signed Celtic shirt!

One Week #4 : Cutty Sark

Our fourth 'One Week' project kicks off next week, and today the students were handed out the brief by the client, the blended Scotch Whisky brand Cutty Sark.

This time around we've expanded the format to involve six design agencies who will act as mentors, hosts and creative collaborators - an original and ground-breaking experiment in design education. We've also appointed a design lead within each team, and they'll direct the projects and manage the agency liaison.

Cutty Sark's Global Brand Controller, Jason Craig, gave a detailed presentation in the studio, covering the history, brand development and target markets for the product. He proposed a very open brief - Cutty Sark are looking for fresh ideas to add momentum to their continuing market recovery from a historical low in terms of sales in 2009.  Mentors Charlie Bell and Walter Hamilton (Whitespace), Charlie Boyle (Multiply), and Graham Neish (Neish) also gave up their valuable time today to attend,  alongside Iain Lauder, who originally brought the project to the design team back in late 2013. Jason's presentation included this short promo detailing Cutty Sark's brand philosophy -



One Week kicks off on Monday 17th, with the teams allocated as follows:

1 : Lead - Calum Mackinnon, Mentor - Graham Neish (Neish)
2 : Lead - Andy Palfreyman, Mentor - Gregor Mathieson (Lewis)
3 : Lead - Ryan Allan, Mentors - Charlie Bell/Walter Hamilton (Whitespace)
4 : Lead - Isabel Alonzo, Mentor - Kirsten Murray (Family)
5 : Lead - Mark Phillips, Mentor - Charlie Boyle (Multiply)
6 : Lead - Jordan Pollock, Mentor - Jen Wood (RAPP)

#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