Creative Edinburgh Awards

An integral part of our new BA (Hons ) programme is that our students are organsied into discrete teams and work on a range of live projects throiughout the year. One project that came in was to design and create a set of 10 awards for the Creative Edinburgh Awards Tenth Anniversary this year.

The Awards celebrate the city's creative community, highlighting the projects, people and places that flourish across Edinburgh and continually ensuring its place on the cultural map, nationally and internationally. Check out the winners here.

Each of the awards represents a category and our students took each category as a theme and devised a set designs laser-etched into 7X7" bamboo plates. Its always great to get a real hands-on proejct and this brief combined illustration, typography and product design. Here are the results:

End-Of-Year Show 2022

Open Wide

Our HND Year 1 have just finished up their submissions to the MPA Roses Student Awards, and we particularly liked this submission by Emma Fitchie and Ryan Allan for the 'Open Wide' brief - to encourage younger people to change their mind-set about avoiding going to the dentist. The team came up with a novel take on 'going bad'...

Stuff We Saw

Just some stuff we saw in London.


Design section in the Tate Modern Shop.


Tanks Expo - Interactive Wall, Tate Modern.


Graffiti, Southbank.


Print job at the Color Company's 24/7 Reprographics store, Mayfair.


Typography Exhibition, Gallery 27, Cork St.


Kerouac's 'On The Road' Manuscript Exhibition, British Library.


Catapults, YCN, Shoreditch.

Hidden Desires

A recent collaboration between HND Graphics and HND Illustration students, 'Hidden Desires' was a project requiring a masthead and sample cover pages for a digital supplement for the iPad. Stefano Coccia (design) and Caz Levack (illustration) came up with a nice twist on original sin which we really liked.

Studio Space R310

Our graphic design students will be working in a revamped studio space in R310 this year.

The studio now boasts an awesome black and white mural, depicting the design process. The mural, which is 5.5m long and 2m in height, was created by HND Visual Communication graduate Adam MacDonald, who spent a week over the summer drawing out the characters, icons and diagrams in his own unique style.

Many thanks again to Adam, who is now working as a junior designer with Edinburgh-based advertising and design company The Covey Agency.


Details:








As well as the mural, we've made rearrangements to our archives, supplies and workspaces, and have acquired a large selection of new paper, in every A size and in a variety of weights, and including translucent, day-glo, satin and grained finishes.

In due course the team will be announcing plans for Induction week, which will commence the week starting Monday 29th August.

88% Iron Man

HND 1 have just finished an MPA Roses brief 'Younique'. The task was to relate yourself to a hero is six steps.

One of the more unusual solutions came from Nic Cameron, who produced a 16-page comic book, drawn in Illustrator, documenting his relationship with the Marvel Superhero Iron Man. Here is a four-spread sampler -

Gray Stuff

Designing book covers is still probably the dream job for many graphic designers, and it's something we look at in detail on the HND course.

So it's great to see that Edinburgh's Talbot Rice Gallery is curating 'Gray Stuff - Designs for Books and Posters, 1952 – 2010' - an exhibition of Alasdair Gray's rather amazing visual works.

Gray is a former student at Glasgow School of Art. But despite his artistic talents, he found fame as a novelist, and at 75, is considered Scotland's greatest living writer.

This exhibition showcases his unique illustrative and typographical style, which has appeared both on the covers of, and inside, his many acclaimed novels, such as Lanark (1981), 1982 Janine (1984) and Poor Things (1992). He has also designed book jackets and magazine covers for dozens of other writers and publications, and has painted a number of murals inside some major buildings in Glasgow.

Alasdair Gary seems to be finally getting the recognition he deserves for his visual art - his work is currently also on show at the Modern Art Gallery, and at the British Art Show (currently on tour in Nottingham). BBC2's Culture Show is featuring a special on Gray tonight at 7pm, and he has just published 'A Life in Pictures' - an autopictography featuring 50 years' worth of designs, sketches and illustrations.

Before the end of this semester we'll hopefully arrange a visit to Gray Stuff for some of the Graphics classes.

More:
Alasdair Gray @wiki