A Showcase Event

The Design Team enjoyed a high-profile invitation to the Scottish Parliament earlier this week.  As long-term supporters of Show Racism the Red Card's Creative Competition, we were asked to represent the College at SRtRC's 'Showcase Event', which took place last night in the Garden Lobby at Holyrood.

Show Racism the Red Card is sponsored by the Scottish Government, SQA, Scottish Football League (SPL and SFL), Unison, Unite, Education Scotland, EIS and the Scottish Football Association (SFA), and their creative award is an annual competition open to schools and FE colleges across the country.

As well as showing off some of our previous work, including winning entries in 2010 and 2011, Design Tutor Chris Hughes and our finalist from last year, Mark Phillips, both gave short talks on the college's involvement in the award.


Pictured at Holyrood - 2012 Creative Award Finalist Mark Phillips, HND Graphics.

Read more about the event at Show Racism the Red Card, Showcase Event, 2013.

Taboo Title Sequence

The addition of Adobe After Effects® CS6 to our labs has sparked lots of interest in title sequencing from our Graphics classes. This year we are offering a collaborative project between HND1 Graphics and HND2 Film&TV, where our students will storyboard and design the title sequence for a short film, directed and shot by a film student.

Some of our students have already produced interesting experiments as part of other projects, including Magda Milek, who created this beautiful typographic sequence for a Channel 4 documentary on social taboos.

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'...

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.

We Love Work Placements

It's that time of year again when our final year students take up to four weeks out from their studies to work in the industry. Placements are a crucial rite-of-passage for any fledgling designer, and gaining valuable industry experience is an important aspect of our course.

The response this year has been as good as in past years despite the economic climate, so we'd like to thank, in no particular order:

Heedi, Lewis, Mortonward, RAPP, Multiply, Editions Financial, Contagious, Heehaw Digital, Edinburgh District Council, Sedley Place, Whitespace, StudioMB, Eskimo, The Union, Line Digital, Story (and quite a few others who were unable to help out this year but whose support we value greatly).

A Busy New Year

Our Final Year students have started 2013 in top gear, tackling a live digital brief and starting their D&AD projects. They are also getting set to go out on work experience in February. We've had a great response from all of our favourite agencies, and the students will start their placements on or after Jan 28th.

The HNC group submitted their packaging projects this week - a choice between the Goji brief for YCN, and a brief to reinvent the inflight experience on BMI's European business flights. A selection of the YCN work will be posted soon, in the meantime here is snippet from Ryan Allan's BMI solution - a fingerprint-activated check-in planner App -