Milestones : Zombie

This year's ISTD (International Society of Typographic Designers) student assessment featured a brief entitled 'Milestones', which asked students to explore a subject of their choice and create a milestone in that subject, primarily through the use of typography.

HND student Simon Griffith's solution was an exploration of the evolution and history of the Zombie movie, designed in the form of a single page website. Simon's concept was to explore the subject without reference to the visual imagery and composition we normally associate with the genre, and instead to look back at a classic pre-digital format, microfiche.

A minimalist menu-based layout, with a great colour scheme, daring use of whitespace and beautifully crafted typography all support the detailed wikipedia-sourced content in this highly original piece of information design.


















You can check out samples from all the ISTD projects on our Pinterest board. Subjects the students explored for this project include the Hubble Telescope, the history of high heels, the genius of Nikola Tesla, Brutalism in Modernism, and a seminal heavyweight boxing match.

Protest!

HND student Ross Turnbull has just submitted this entry to the ISTD (International Society of Typographic Designers) Student Assessment for 2014. This year ISTD set five briefs, and Ross chose Number 4, 'Protest!' - which challenges the designer to explore the idea of protest via typography. Ross' solution, inspired by Constructivism and Punk, was to create a pocket-sized 'Guide to Safe Protesting', which could be distributed in a range of A-sized double-sided posters and then folded down into a handy pamphlet. As well as sketchbooks and the final artwork, Ross had to submit a detailed annotation of his typesetting and layout strategy:

Sketchbooks:



Annotations:





Artwork:





Insitu:





The Pamphlet:

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.

 

Bringing Back Arena

Some sample work from our HND2 class who were tasked with relaunching the seminal 1980's men's magazine Arena. The original title, launched in 1986 by Nick Logan (and designed by Neville Brody), eventually folder in 2008.

This brief is the last-ever design project set by tutor David Wilson, before he leaves his post later this month for pastures new. The brief involved creating a new masthead for the title, and producing a cover and a series of spreads focussing on Arena's key themes, celebrity and style.

Arron Gillespie



Ali Kerr


Jody Hogg


Rowan Campbell



Jonathan Walton

Typography Posters

As well as the Mentor project, which the class have just been issued, two of the main HND projects during the early part of this semester will be Typography and Editorial, the latter working alongside our HND Photography students.

As a warm-up, the class revisited asymmetric typography and the compound grid, and came up with these nice A4 posters during a session last week.

HND 1 : Magazine Covers

HND Year 1 have just finished a nice print project. This was set by David W and required the class to produce two covers and a doublepage spread for a world music magazine. Check out some of the great pieces this project produced in the Galleries section.