Typecast Posters

For their typography project this year the HNC worked in pairs on a project called 'Typecast'. We put a set of 12 names in a hat - 6 typographers and 6 typeface designers. Each pair of students picked one out, and then were tasked with explooring their subject and then creating two A2 posters in celebration of their chosen designer. 

The typographers were : Neville Brody, April Greiman, Reid Miles, George Olden, Paula Scher and Wolfgang Weingart. 

The typeface designers were : Matthew Carter, Adrian Frutiger, Herb Lubalin, Bruno Maag, Erik Spiekermann, Carol Twombly. 

Once this project was completetd we exhibited in the new BA Studio as part of our annual Mentor Night - where our industry mentors gather to kick off the mentoring programme each year. Designers love type and obviously they loved these posters.  

The font used for the Typecast  name was also designed by a former student Terry Smith, who is now Senior Porudct Designer at Dyson in Bristol and a long-standing mentor, and the A2s were printed on 180gsm matte paper at Edinburgh Copyshop.

Mentor Quotes

Today we are revisiting a charming and insightful project by 2015 graduate Kiera Winfield, who collated a series of quotes about the course from our industry mentors of that year, and then assembled them into a short type-based film.

Editorial : Creative Friendships

For their recent editorial project, the HNC class were given a brief to explore creative friendships from a selection of three - Ella Fizgerald and Marilyn Monroe, Nick Cave and Kyle Minogue, and David Bowie and George Undrewood. The brief for this required the students to focus not only on the connections between the subjects, but also the connectiosn between type and image inside the space - for this project set at two facing A3 pages. Here are three great examples focussing on the relationship between jazz great Ella Fitzgerald and movie star Marilyn Monroe -

1. Eric Molina
2. Paloma Aguilar
3. Daryl Hutton
4. Katie Slesser

Hot Issues in Graphic Design

HNC Graphic Design recently completed their design-in-context essays - a 1500 word exploration of a hot topic in Visual Communication. The essay questions included controversial subjects in creative advertising, such as sex, alcohol and tobacco, plus design trends, and also the option to explore a single typeface. As part of this project we also asked the group to design and publish their essay in booklet format. Working with content you have written yourself is always an interesting challenge, and you can check out some example covers and spreads below, and view the full range of visual ideas on this project at our issuu digital publication page at issuu.com

 
Sophia Bhullar - Sex Sells

McKenzie Armitage - Making Addiction Cool

Darik Malik - Design Sprints

Concours D'ecriture 2020

This is the second year that we have collaborated with The French Institute and both Napier and Edinburgh Universities in the annual Concours D'ecriture, where foreign language degree students compose a piece of creative writing, and the results are interpreted by our final year students as pieces of visual communication, expressed purely as typography.

Students submitted writing from Edinburgh, Napier, Stirling and St Andrews Universities, and these were judged by the partners this year - the French Institute, The Goethe Institute (Glasgow) and the Franco-Scottish Society.

Last year an exhibition of the work was held at the Institute, just off the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, but this year the exhibiton is all virtual - on screens at the French Institute and via instagram and the Institute's culture blog. The theme this year was music, with all the written entries being inspired by a piece of music. 

This allowed our students to think beyond print and produce some unsusual responses, including lenticular animation, video, light projections, editorial pieces and even packaging in the form of a chocolate wrapper. We also published the visuals, alongside all the written pieces, in a broadsheet newspaper, printed by Newspaper Club, and on display at the Institute during December.  Full details of the winning pieces, plus all the visual work can be found on the French Institute Culture blog here and the newspaper can be viewed at issuu.

Concours d’écriture créative 2019

The HND Graphics class currently have an exhibition on show in Edinburgh at the French Institute. The set of 37 typographic posters are the result of an annual creative writing competition - 2019 concours d’écriture créativen - co-organised by Edinburgh Napier University, the University of Edinburgh, the University of St Andrews, Edinburgh College, the Franco-Scottish Society, the Goethe-Institut Glasgow and the Institut français d’Ecosse.

An award ceremony for the 2019 concours d’écriture créative took place on the opening night Nov 21st, followed by the exhibition displaying the winning texts in poster format. The exhibition will be on display until 13 December 2019, and is free to view. Some samples -



Quand tout a bascule, written by Julie Donier Meroz, designed by Zoe Leung.



Amants sans frontieres, written by Olivia Walsh, designed by Rachel Nesbitt.



Une lettre aux mais amis, written by Rachel Prowse, designed by Marta Dal Farra.



Le plus mauvais jour de ma vie !  written by Jan Palysa, designed by Melinda Babai



Mn passeport ! written by Viktoria Jancurova, designed by Balazs Hirth

Nova Magazine

This year our HNC editorial design project was to reinvent the seminal 1960s feminist magazine, Nova.  Nova pioneered journalism that tackled taboo subjects and radical feminist ideas during the 1960s and early 70s.  Times change, but many of these issues are still with us, and Nova's aim is to capture a new readership in the current #metoo LGBT Fake News climate.  Some examples of masthead cover and spread concepts -


Illaria Veroli







Lewis Lee-Grant





Gemma Gorton







Murray Notman

Berlin Letterpress Experience

As part of our annual study trip to Berlin, we booked the Year One Graphics class on a visit to P98a - Erik Spiekermann's fantastic Letterpress studio located on Potsdamer Strasse in central Berlin.

Spiekermann set up this studio primarily to work on personal projects and exploring how letterpress type  can be redefined and used in the 21st century. The studio is equipped with a number of Korrex letterpress machines and Heidelberg Windmill press as well as a modern Riso printer.

The studio also designs and cuts its own wooden letterpress type.

Director Ferdinand Ulrich  explained how the studio operates, demonstrated setting up the machines, and showed the class samples from Erik Spikermann's collections - including font specimen books from the early 1900s, and more than 500 cases of poster type, mostly made from wood.

Ferdinand's colleague Lunia  D'Ambrosino also explained how she had applied for an internship at P98a having graduated with a Bachelors degree in Visual Communication.


Typesetting a poster on the Korrex.


Editorial piece printed via Letterpress


Erik Spiekermann's signature quote, letterpress A1 posterzine.


Ferdinald Ulrich talking to the class.


Find out more about P98a on their website, and visit if you happen to be in Berlin.

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.

Espresso Loves Colour

Our NC Graphics class kicked off 2019 by presenting their packaging project.  We run this project each year, and some of the Units integrated in this work include Colour, Introduction to Typography, Digital Media, and Sketchbooks.  So a lot of new skills are on display, backed by solid research into the client and the product market. It always makes for an interesting project, and the deliverables need to include one completed physical example of their packaging idea.

For this brief the class looked at Union Coffee's espresso blend range. The aim wasn't to rebrand the company (Union Coffee was rebranded in 2015 by Studio Output), but to look at improving the profile of the espresso range at point-of-sale and in displays, specifically in supermarkets rather than the higher end retail outlets they were more comfortable in.

One standout, and a good yardstick for the quality which this class is showing, came from Bethany Carrick, whose concept merged geographical locations with bold colours, abstract patterns, and some clean, delicate typography to create a vibrant set of boxed products capturing the essence of the four blended flavours on offer.

YOYP Xmas Alphabet

We had Whitespace in a couple of weeks ago to run a guerilla day for their Year of Young People project. Whitespace briefed 60 students (also including a class from Napier University) to each take a letter and create a festive themed alphabet. Chris Brohl and Niamh Curran came in to R310 and  over the course of the day the students put together a set of creative letters.  Everything was top secret, given that the results were goign to be used on real Christmas cards.

The resulting alphabet was used to send out letters to Whitespace's clients, friends and supporters. You can check out the results of the project, and read more about it here.

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