Pav is YCN Student of the Year

To cap off a recent run of awards successes, we gathered last week at the virtual YCN Students Awards to see 4 Edinburgh College students (3 from Graphics Design and 1 from User Experience Design) pick up their YCN Commendations.

Nick Defty and the team at YCN hosted an excellent awards evening, with over 100 participants and a slide show featuriong all the commended work. As well as awarding commendations by brief, YCN also award a student of the year prize for the most outstanding submission, and this year it was shared by two students, Daniel Mason (for the Guardian brief, University of Lincoln) and our very own Pavils Vorobjovs for his work on the Oliver Bonas / Fedrigoni brief. All the commendees are featured here.

Since 2008 the Graphics course has picked up around 20 Commendations, but this is a first having one of our students recognised in this way, so its a tremendous achievement. You can check out Pav's awesome winning work here.

Commendations & Shortlists!

Some great news towards the end of the 2019-2020 term to help get us all through lockdown

Firstly our students have again been recognised with commendations in the 2020 YCN Student Awards.HNC Graphic Design students Valentina Torella and Elia Ballesteros picked up commendations for their submissions to briefs by Camden Town Brewery and Fedrigoni / Oliver Bonas respectively. This brings the course's run of commendations dating back as far as 2008 to a total of 21.

The YCN Awards started in 2001. Each year YCN publishes a collection of live creative, marketing and business challenges — written by partners, and distributed across the Further & Higher Education network.   Check out this year's full list of Commendations here and you can read a bit more about the success, including some nice quote over on the main college blog.

Secondly, we are also celebrating 4 of our final year students making the shortlist for the Marketing Society Star Awards.  Huge congratulations go to Melinda Babai, Gonzalo Cervilla, Balaz Hirth and Rachel Nesbit who all worked incredibly hard during the initial weeks of lockdown to complete their pitches for this competition. Check out the full shortlist here.  This year the Star Awards is a free virtual event,  broadcasting on October 22nd.

Our newest YCN Winners!

Earlier this week Tutors Alex Gunn and Richie Bisset accompanied our Commended YCN students down to London for the annual YCN Student Awards.  Our winners from HN Graphics were Anne Bender, Ben Neilson, David Symmons (Gumtree brief), Sean  Gordon (Hostelworld brief) and from HN UX Design, Agnieska Koundourakis (Energy Saving Trust brief). Well done all (and here's the full list of commendees).

This year the ceremony was held in Toynbee Hall in East London, and featured a keynote talk by Pentagram's Astrid Stavro.

These commendations get more difficult to win each year as the competition gets larger, with 1000s of entries from UK and International Universities and Arts Schools for some of the more popular briefs.  Since 2008 our Graphics course has now racked up 18 of these wins so the pressure is on to repeat our success in 2020.




Sean, Ben and David.



Agnieska and Anne.

Pics by Richie, nice work.

YCN Quartet

YCN have announced their commended students for 2018/2019, and Edinburgh College have garnered no less than six awards - including a stunning haul of 4 commendations for our Graphic Design students.

HNC Graphic Design students Anne Bender, Ben Neilson and David Symmons all won for their submissions to the Gumtree brief, whilst their classmate Sean Gordon was amongst the winners for his work on the Hostelworld brief.  Congratulations also to HNC UX Design student Agneszka Koundourakis (Energy Saving Trust), and Emma Pye (Gumtree). Well done all!

 We've had many multiple winning years at YCN, but this is the first time we have not entered any team submissions, so each individual win is extra special.  We'll be taking our winners down to London in September for the YCN Awards Ceremony at the Barbican.

Full results are on the New Now YCN website.

YCN At The Barbican

Earlier this week we attended the YCN Awards in London to see five Edinburgh College students (four from Graphic  Design and one from User Experience Design) receive YCN Commendations.

YCN has been going now since 2001,  and we have been regularly attending the awards since 2008. This year Director Nick Defty introduced the ceremony at the Barbican with a nice summary of the YCN ethos, its aims and achievements since its inception. He talked about some of the challenges currently faced by the Creative Industries, and also the opportunities encouraged by YCN, things like collaboration, fresh ideas and inclusion.

This year there were three guest speakers - Ciara Phelan and Dorcas Brown from Grand Matter,  Anna Carpen, Creative Director at And Rising, and James Greenfield, the co-founder of Koto.  As always these speakers were tasked with providing words of wisdom and advice to the YCN Commendees, and their efforts were insightful, amusing and hugely appreciated.  James Greenfield in particular stuck a great note when he advised all creative students to try and eliminate worry from their work, and just get on which developing great ideas.

HND Graphics students Iain Waugh, Kit Lawson and Kryz Wajand produced winning entries for Dogs Trust, Art Fund and British Gymnastics respectively, with Natasha Ryan and Sophie McKinlay (from the HND UXD course) commended for the Action on Hearing Loss brief. All received a wonderful YCN wooden block this year, designed by Tom Forsyth.

Since 2009 the HN Graphics course has amassed no less that 19 YCNs, a formidable feat competing against Art Schools and Universities across the UK and Europe.

Its become a tradition on these visits to the YCN Awards to catch up with any former graduates who are now working in London, and this year we met up with 2015 Graduate Olga Kominek, who went on to study Graphic Design at Glasgow School of Art, graduating this year with a 1st BA(Hons). Olga is now working as an intern with design and fashion magazine Wallpaper*. You can check out her work over on behance.




Kryz, Kit and Natasha at the YCN reception.


Iain Waugh, Natasha Ryan, and Tutor Alex Gunn


YCN solid wooden blocks


Kit Lawson gets on stage at the Barbican.

Four Commendations

YCN have announced the commendations for their annual student awards, with our HND Graphics course picking up no less than four of them. This is the most commendations we've had in a single year (the course chalked up three commendations in both 2011 and 2015). This year Iain Waugh, Kit Lawson and Kryz Wajand produced winning entries for Dogs Trust, Art Fund and British Gymnastics.

YCN had a late announcement for the Action on Hearing Loss brief, with Natasha Ryan achieving a commendation for her submission.  Our sister course HND Interactive Design also secured a commendation for this brief for Sophie McKinlay, meaning that five students for the HN Visual Communication area will be travelling to London in September to the YCN Awards.

Samples from the Commendations -

Iain Waugh - Dogs Trust




Natasha Ryan - Dogs Trust








Krys Wajand - British Gymnastics






Kit Lawson - Art Fund



More : Full list of 2018 Commendations

YCN Awards

Final Year student Jeff Gillan has won a Commendation from YCN for his creative solution to the Cornetto brief.  Jeff's concept 'Snap, Share and Scoop' features some playful copy and a nice user experience.  Check out the full submission on Jeff's Behance 







Jeff can now look forward to a trip to London in September for the annual YCN Awards, alongside classmate Ildiko Rohonka who won a commendation for her solution to the Quorn brief, which you can also view on her Behance.  Well done guys!

Our YCN winners!

Our YCN Winners Catriona Munro and Liam Philp attended the YCN Awards at the Barbican in London with tutors Chris Hughes and Alex Gunn.  The students were commended for their response to the Orchard Pig brief. This year YCN saw the biggest amount of entries in its 15 year history, with Art Schools, Colleges and Universities from all over the world submitting competition work.

This is the 13th and 14th YCN Awards our students have won since 2008.  Catriona and Liam are just entering their final year of study on our Visual Communication / Graphic Design course and have a very bright future.  Well done guys!

More photos of the evening here on the YCN website.

Our YCN Winners!

YCN Commendations

Congratulations to four of our HNC students, who picked up YCN Commendations today for their project submissions.

Liam Henderson and Aiste Piechaviciute won for J20, with Annabel Gibb and Kirsten Bell winning their commendation for TopDeck Travel.  We'll be accompanying them down to London in September to the awards ceremony. The full list of winners is available on the YCN website.


J20 - Aiste Peichaviciute + Liam Henderson - 'the element of..'











Topdeck - Annabel Gibb + Kirsten Bell - #livelikealocal

All the A's at YCN

l/r Emil Blums, Luke Milne, Elan Tang, William Ford, Carmen Bermudez, Alex Gunn (Tutor).
Photo-Richard Bisset.

Tutors Alex Gunn and Richie Bisset accompanied five of our students down to London earlier this week to the annual YCN Student Awards. This year YCN moved from their regular awards venue at Shoreditch Town Hall to the equally impressive Marriot in Grosvenor Square. As usual the team at YCN put on an excellent show including a live band, a great atmosphere for networking, and the rather apt theme for the night - 'Gold'.

Two of our HND Interactive Design students Carmen and Elan won commendations for their work on the Experian brief, whilst HND Graphic Design students Emils, Luke and William all picked up commendations for their Goji projects.

Experian have asked Carmen and Elan to sign a worldwide contract to use their ideas, whilst Emils 'Goji Gorilla' idea had been under top secret development over the summer, and is rolling out at a major high street electronics retailer later this month. You can check Goji Gorilla out at Goji Collective.

Design Team Trip

We're just back from a couple of days in London, visiting agencies, reviewing our curriculum delivery and planning for next year.

On Thursday we visited YCN in Shoreditch, where Kezia and Zoe kindly showed us some commended work from their new Kickstart Award. We also discussed the student awards, and YCN's future plans for employer engagement in the creative industries. Hopefully the YCN team will visit Edinburgh next year when they set off on their annual college roadshow.

We also popped into the independent comic publisher NoBrow, just round the corner from YCN, to check out some of the best illustration on the planet. They were busy preparing for the 2nd East London Comic & Art Festival (in Bethnal Green on Sat 22nd).

The team also met up with one of our former graduates Hannah Bloomfield, a designer with Edinburgh agency Multiply who has taken up the challenge of establishing and leading the creative team in Multiply's new London studio. Hannah has kindly agreed to come back up to Edinburgh to do a one day workshop with our students later this year.

On Friday we headed across town to Notting Hill to visit the biggest independent design agency in the world - Pentagram. The agency was set up in London in 1972, has offices in New York, San Francisco, Austin and Berlin, and its partners include the likes of Michael Bierut, Paula Scher, Harry Pearce and Angus Hyland. Marta Larsson from Pentagram gave us a great tour of the studio, including the design library, the archive vault, a couple of amazing meeting rooms, and the original print workshop from their pre-Mac days. The studio walls feature famous logos like Nissan, V&A, Eat, Faber & Faber, Penguin, and Reuters, and a brilliant original hand-drawn map by Paula Scher. One thing that surprised us is that the whole agency sits down every lunchtime in a cool dining area and they all eat together. One thing that didn't surprise us was that Pentagram receives about 1000 cv's a week.

As a parting gift we were all given a few Pentagram goodies - including the Pentagram black bible and the rather wonderful Pentagram Marks book, a frenchfold binding of 500 logotypes.


Pentagram Gifts


Pentagram's Lobby


The Pentagram Library 

Award-winning Friday

On Friday we received the fantastic news that our students recorded award wins in both YCN and D&AD. We picked up two YCN commendations for HNC Graphic Design, and a further two in HND Interactive Design. You can check the results here.

The team also received their magic emails from D&AD, with the news that Alistair Kerr and Hussain Al-khirsan, HND Graphic Design, took a Best of Year at D&AD for their Dept of Health DARE brief.



The winning work will be exhibited at our graduate show One Night Stand, on May 29th at the Traverse Theatre Bar, but you can check out samples of the D&AD Best of Year on the D&AD website. Very well done to all.

Our YCN Annuals

A huge shipment of YCN Annuals arrived earlier this week. We are actually wondering if there has been a mistake, with no less than eight boxes of annuals totally 96 copies sitting in the studio!



With Art Direction by YCN's Alex Hunting, and design by Arthur Carey, this is yet another fantastic piece of print design. The annual features articles and interviews with former YCN winners, educators, and selected industry clients who set the briefs, plus 72 pages of commendations (the very first of which, page 74, features our very own Katy Johnson.

Our YCN Visit

As part of our London Trip, the students made the short journey from Russel Square to Shoreditch to visit the YCN Studio, where Project Director Kezia Clark gave a fantastic talk about the YCN Awards and about working in the Creative Industries. YCN's founder Nick Defty also took the time to pop in and say hello.  Inspiring stuff.





Read more about our visit to YCN on their website.

Katy's YCN commendation

One of the many highlights of our end-of-year show is that YCN announce their commendation winners during the same week.

The awards list for 2011/2012 appeared today, and one of our Graphic Design students, Katy Johnson, is amongst the winners. This is the sixth YCN Commendation in the past four years for our students.

Katy designed an outstanding response to the Marks & Spencer brief, packaging an M&S picnic for two. She has just finished the first year of her HND, and can now look forward a fantastic start to next year, with a trip to London in September to the YCN Awards Ceremony. Her work will also be showcased in the 2012 edition of the YCN Student Awards Annual.













More:
YCN winners 2011/2012
Showtime 2012

Heinz Salad Cream YCN

Our NC Graphics groups A & B recently completed their first competition project - a YCN brief to promote Heinz Salad Cream to a younger audience. As part of the brief, we also asked the classes to devise a digital presentation, featuring their research, a series of posters, and either an ambient or digital in situ idea. Here is a short selection from the finished work, showcasing some good copy skills and lots of visual imagination.



Calum Mackinnon



Jennifer Mason




Ross Corstorphine



Andy Palfreyman.



Holly Kemp.