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).

Magfest 2016

Magfest is Scotland's largest festival dedicated to magazine publishing and is held annually in Edinburgh. This is its fifth year, and was the biggest yet, with more than 300 delegates and a great city-centre location at the Central Hall, Tollcross.  The theme for 2016 was 'fight for your audience', and all of the talks loosely addressed the state of the sector and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

Magfest attracts publishers, illustrators, journalists, photographers and designers (professionals and students), and of course educators. The format consists of keynote speakers on the main stage, broken up by short panel discussions, breakout workshops in other parts of the venue, and short talks by up-and-coming magazine publishers.

This year the list of speakers was exceptional, the pitches by new magazine publishers was a minor revelation, and the general organisation, promotion and networking opportunities of the event were all first rate.  I attended the morning sessions and some of the afternoon talks - a group of our HND Graphic Design students spent the whole day and had a great experience.



My program copy, beautifully typeset by Eric Campbell.

The morning highlights included the opening speaker, Vanessa Kingori MBE from GQ Magazine, who set the tone for the whole event by looking at the challenges facing the publishing industry, and the opportunities of new technologies and superior content. It was immediately clear after a few minutes that we were all in for an absorbing day, especially when Vanessa played a cool clip of David Bowie in 1999 predicting that the internet would alter how we communicate in ways which "we can't yet even imagine".

Also up in the morning was the CEO of News UK (and former editor at the Scottish Sun), David Dinsmore, who described the huge operation the group runs across the nation, and the many successes of Scotland's best-selling tabloid newspaper.

Next up was Holland's Ernst-Jan Pfauth from De Correspondant - a Dutch-language digital magazine of crowd-sourced journalists which is ad-free and uses a disruptive strategy to operate outside of the commercial constraints normally associated with magazines.  Original content, beautiful design, and an inspired subscription model have been key to this title's rapid success. For me this was the highlight of the day, and with hindsight, a talk like this about publishing would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

We also had an interesting diversion into modern Scottish politics with Angela Haggerty, editor of CommonSpace, talking about the vacuum this news platform has filled in terms of balanced journalism in post-indyref Scotland. Angela also talked about a social media platform funded by Common Weal, called 'CommonSocial'.



Lunch (in a metal box) is served.

The early afternoon talks included Terri White, Editor-In-Chief of Empire Magazine (and a former editor of Time Out New York), who discussed current trends in film magazines and the risks publishers need to take - which she duly demonstrated by playing a hilarious x-rated Empire infomercial delivered by Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool - google it.

In between these keynotes I really enjoyed the short pitches from all the new publishers, in particular the titles She is Fierce, Counterpoint, and Nutmeg stood out.  It's a pity I missed Astrid Stavro and Primate's Espen Brunborg, who talked about editorial design and web design respectively, but I'm reliably informed by our students that these two talks were superb.

And with workshops on comics, infographics and etc, there was something for everyone at Magfest. The free (and rather excellent) lunch, a set of great freelance stalls, and a fully stocked shop of Scottish titles all added to the sense that Magfest is firmly established as a brilliant event for creatives and publishers, and probably doesn't need to fight for its audience next year.

A Brief Student Show was like this...

Our annual Industry Night & Show - A Brief Student Show - was held at the Fruitmarket Gallery back in June, and turned out to be our biggest and most successful yet. More than 200 industry practitioners, designers, graduates and employers assembled to view our students' work and celebrate design education.

With the new term just a week or so away, we thought it might be nice to look back at the show with this short film of the event, when some of our mentors gave their impressions of the work this year.




You can also go to our flickr stream and see photos from the event, taken by our resident photographer Derek Anderson.

Showing Off More Winners

On the back of A Brief Student Show, our hugely successful one night exhibition last week at the Fruitmarket Gallery, we've had a flurry of award wins for our design students, across all three study years - NC, HNC and HND.

In the NC year (our introductory foundation year), Aga Pomaranska won both the Richard Demarco Award and the Creative Student of the Year Awards at the College's internal prize-giving event - a first for our courses. One of the most influential figures in the Scottish arts world, Demarco is a co-founder of the Traverse Theatre and founder of the Richard Demarco Gallery. As a Trustee of the College, his award is given each year for outstanding achievement in Art & Design at the College. Aga will be continuing her studies next year on the HND Graphic Design course.


Aga Pomaranska with her Awards

In the HNC year, Catriona Munro and Liam Philp both won a YCN Commendation for the Orchard Pig brief. YCN is an important award, with thousands of entries from UK and international Universities and Art Schools, and these wins represent our 13th and 14th Commendations since 2008. The guys can now look forward to an exciting visit to London in September for the YCN Awards.

Finally, HND student Charlie Law had to leave the our final show early to get to Edinburgh's Corn exchange for the Marketing Society Awards, where he had been shortlisted for the Star Creative Student.


Charlie with presenter Laura Whitmore and Star Awards Chair, Paul Condron.

Charlie fought off competition from nominees at DJCAD and ECA to pick up our 4th win in 5 years at Scotland's showcase celebration in the Marketing sector.  Charlie starts a placement at Digitaslbi this week and will be the toast of the agency. Well done to all!

More:
Marketing Society Scotland 2016 Award Winners
YCN 2016 Student Commendations
HND Exhibition Sampler from A Brief Student Show

Techshare 2015

On Thursday and Friday of last week, four of our HND students attended the Techshare Europe 2015 event at the Glasgow Science Centre.

The conference, now in its 4th year, attracts a wide range of international speakers and industry experts and promotes discussion and debate on wearable technology and digital access and engagement.

The speaker lineup featured Nick Cain and Kiran Kaja (Google), Daniel Hubble (Microsoft), Richard Moreton (Samsung), Steve Bennett (Dolphin), Thibault Péant (Claria), Chris Yiu (Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations), Jamie Chen-Pensley (Catapult Transport Systems) and Gary O'Donaghue (BBC Washington Correspondent).

Student teams from Duncan of Jordanstone, Glasgow Caledonian University, Napier University, Glasgow School of Art, Abertay University and Edinburgh College were involved in the Scottish Institute for Enterprise (SIE) Innovation Challenge. The students worked on a brief for the RNIB Group, producing ideas in digital experience to tackle the challenges facing blind and partially sighted people and pitched their solutions at the end of the conference.  You can check out how Techshare happened on their Storify board.



Tutor Helena Good with our Techshare team - Hannah Johnson, Rumana Sayed, Liam Henderson, Rhys McGeary.

Realising Their Potential

Team Realise were named winners of our One Week project on Thursday by Lucy Hine, Marketing Manager for Innis and Gunn.

"We weren't prepared for just how great the work from all the teams turned out to be," said Lucy. "The presentations were very professional and we couldn't believe how much had been accomplished given the short project time. Every team had at least one idea that was completely new and exciting in terms of answering the brief and promoting our brand, but Team Realise gave us the strongest solution that worked right across all the required channels."

Team Realise's concept 'A Great Find' included strong branding visuals, a raft of guerilla advertising ideas, and a sophisticated user experience. Samples from all the work, plus a short film about the project, will be available soon.  In the meantime you can read mentor Gregor Matheson's take on how the project went over at the Realise blog.

Work by all the teams is currently being exhibited in the college Hub. Our Storify timeline documents the project and the reaction to the winning pitch.

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

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.

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 -

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

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

Red Card Finalists

Earlier this week two of our NC students were shortlisted for the Show Racism The Red Card creative competition. The NC course is an introductory course to the two-year HND Visual Communication, and students Charlie Law and Kim Louden both submitted their entries to the Sectarianism brief. Charlie commented 'I was surprised to find out about the Red Card competition, as I felt other members in the class had much stronger concepts!'

This creative award is sponsored by the SQA and the Scottish Football Association, and the prize-giving is held annually at Hampden Park in Glasgow. Each year there are more than 2000 entries across all categories, and this will be a fourth successive shortlist success for our students. The winning work will be used as part of Show Racism the Red Card's anti-racism publicity throughout Scotland in 2014/15, and the artwork will go to all schools, colleges and councils. Judges this year included former Scotland Manager Craig Brown, and Scottish novelist William McIlvanney.

Charlie Law:

Kim Louden:

Learning & Teaching Commendation

The Design team picked up a Commendation at the College Development Annual Awards recently. The Awards recognise the talent, skills and achievements of colleges, their staff and learners, and highlights outstanding projects and initiatives taking place in colleges across Scotland.

The Learning & Teaching Award recognises a college that has launched or developed imaginative and creative ideas to improve effectiveness of learning and teaching. Our nomination in that category was for the Induction Programme, an internal mentoring strategy where our NC, HNC and HND groups collaborate on a project during the first week of their respective courses/sessions.

 
(l/r) Alan Lennon, Alex Gunn, Chris Hughes

One of our longest serving mentors, Alan Lennon (Lennon Design) accompanied tutors Alex Gunn and Chris Hughes, and Vice Principal Julie McCran, to the Raddison Blu in Glasgow for the ceremony, which was hosted by Sally Magnusson.

This completes a hat-trick of awards this year for the course, along with Best Education Event (Highly Commended, Scottish Event Awards), Innovation (Highly Commended, SQA Star Awards).

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).

It's in Holly's Hands

Moving On Inverclyde visited the college today to announce the winning design for our live Mentor project. We arranged for samples of the work to be exhibited on boards and on a suite of Macs in the college Hub area, along with a buffet lunch. The client then presented a nice summary of their decision-making on the project before handing out prizes for the winner and two runners-up. They also presented a small token of appreciation to all 19 students who submitted work.

The joint runners-up Calum MacKinnon and Craig Nicholson received £50 each. Holly Kemp's 'The Power Is In Your Hands' campaign, coupled with a great logotype, was overall winner. Holly was presented with a cheque for £250, and her idea will now be taken into production across web and print.

Moving On Inverclyde's John Hackett said "The presentations were all really excellent, and this left us with a huge problem. In the end, having whittled it down to six possible winners, Holly's logo stood out as something we could use and build upon in the years to come".

Holly and Calum are both mentored by RAPP's Jen Wood, and are currently hot-desking at the agency, whilst Craig is working with one of our longest-serving mentors, Graham Neish.

Events Awards Success

The Design Team are celebrating after picking up a Commendation on Thursday evening at the Scottish Event Awards.

Back in July we received a nomination in the 'Best Educational Event' category for our sell-out One Night Stand graduate show at the Traverse. Our event team - comprising the design tutors, HND students Ryan Allan and Byron Abbot, plus mentor Iain Lauder - accompanied Neil Manning, Programme Leader for Art & Design in Creative Industries, to the Crowne Plaza in Glasgow for the ceremony. Check out the full results at the SEA website.

The HND Graphic Design course has two further opportunities to win important educational awards later this year. We've been named finalists in the Innovation Award category (for our Mentoring Programme) at the SQA Star Awards, and have also been shortlisted for a Learning & Teaching Award (for our course induction strategy) at the College Development Network. Both awards ceremonies will be held in November.

More: Scottish Events Awards winners (in the DRUM)

London 2013

Our 2013 study trip to London has just about been finalised for this year, and will take place during first week in November. The plan is to visit a couple of design agencies (details soon), check out some exhibitions (including an annual pilgrimage to Tate Modern), and generally soak up London's unique design inspiration vibes. Our HNC group did a short project to design a poster for the trip, and the winning design came from Alasdair Muir, with his Pentagram-inspired monochrome travel symbols, closely followed by Saulius Stebulis' surreal take on three days of sightseeing.

One Night Stand Event Nomination

Our 2013 graduate show, 'One Night Stand', has made the shortlist for Best Educational Event at the 2013 Scottish Event Awards. Our concept, to reinvent the graduate show format by exhibiting for a single evening only, produced a full house at the Traverse Theatre Bar, attracting more than 100 advertising and design professionals from 47 of Edinburgh's best agencies and studios.





The awards ceremony will be held on Thursday 26th September at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Glasgow. The full list of nominations is available on the Scottish Event Awards website.