#thecreativetakeover

Holly (l) and Niamh pick up the big cheque for their Schools Project win.

We hosted the presentations earlier this week for our Schools Project - a project about engaging more closely with Art & Design teachers in Secondary Schools across Scotland. The project was sponsored by Threebrand - an Edinburgh-based Design Agency who are involved in our mentoring programme and are strong supporters of design education and employer engagement.

The project hopes to improve information about FE and studying in the Creative Industries in particular, and also to encourage schools to look at the way they prepare school leavers for interviews, portfolios and Higher Education courses.  This collaboration between the College and Secondary Schools aims to develop a new strategy for increasing access to FE for school leavers.

Prior to the presentations we held a short reception in the Hub, where sample HND Graded Unit and HNC design projects were exhibited, and the presentations then took place in studio R310.

We had five shortlisted projects 
Liam Philp (HND)
Laurence Barber and Hazel Pike (HNC)
Chelsea Foley and Natasha Ryan (NC)
Christina Giannakou (HND)
Niamh Curran & Holly McNie (HNC)

The students pitched to a panel of High School Art & Design teachers -

Scott Hunter (SQA Graphics Principal Verifier), Stuart Longair (Stewarts Melville), Shonagh Primrose (Tynecastle High), Philippa Drummond (Drummond High) and Robert Ward (Craigroyston High)

 - who kindly came along to the Granton Campus for the evening.  They watched each presentation and then provided feedback and selected a winning project.  The top prize included becoming a College Ambassador for Edinburgh College, and receiving a funding cheque to further develop the idea into a real campaign or product.



Helena presents College Ambassador badges to Holly and Niamh.

Massive well done to Niamh Curran and Holly McNie who won the top prize with their 'creative takeover' concept.  Niamh and Holly will now look at fully developing their concept into a new promotional educational tool to be rolled out to high schools in 2017.

DMA Awards 2016

HND Graphic Design students Jennifer Grieve and Sam Haynes were in London last week, with tutor Helena Good, to attend the annual DMA Awards.

Jennifer and Sam were shortlisted in the DMA Breakthrough Award - which recognises emerging creative talent from the UK's Universities and Colleges. The pair picked up the runners' up spot and did some valuable networking, raising the profile of the course and doing Edinburgh College proud.

This is the second year in a row that we've had student work shortlisted at this national-recognised industry competition.  As well as attending the awards event, Sam and Jennifer presented their design solution at the Proximity Agency for the client (The Economist).

More about the Breakthrough award here, and a full list of DMA Award winners here.

Another Breakthrough

Earlier this week the shortlist for this year’s DMA Breakthrough Award, sponsored by The Economist, were announced.

Entries came from 11 different Universities and Colleges around the UK, with students studying anything from advertising and marketing to graphic design and psychology. The shortlist included two of our current HND students, Sam Haynes and Jennifer Grieve, who submitted a standout solution for the Economist's direct mail brief. The winner(s) will take home a paid internship at a top agency and a £1,000 cash prize, with second place pocketing £500 and third place receiving £250.

Last year our HND student Ayesha Islam's submission for the East of England Co-Op brief took the Breakthrough Award, and she won a month-long placement in London at Proximity.

Sam and Jennifer will be travelling to London on Dec 6th to the DMA Awards - good luck guys!

Highland Park One Week

Here's the video from our recent One Week project for Highland Park (Edrington), nicely shot and edited by our resident video specialist Richie McAllister.  The agencies involved this time around were Lewis, Multiply, Neish, Teviot and Whitespace.
 

Two Truths & One Lie

This is an annual project for the NC Graphics class. This year, they had to write three statements about their music taste and produce a typographic response.  All the work will be posted on Pinterest soon, but here are some nice examples, all pretty self-explanatory, you just have to guess which ones are true...

Ruari Smith


Lea L'Homme


Blanca Jiminez


Connor Burns


Kit Lawson

Highland Park - One Week

On Friday our design teams pitched their one week projects to the panel from Edrington - Jason, Wendy and Juliet. Each team presented their project and then they had to mount their deliverables down in the college hub for exhibition, where the other teams, and some of our industry mentors, could view all the work.

For this project, we worked with design agencies Lewis, Multiply, Whitespace, Teviot and Neish. Each team consisted of up to seven students, at five different locations across Edinburgh, and in some cases with multiple mentors to a team.  The teams had four days to produce the creative work, and 30 minutes on the Friday to present it.

As well as tutor visits and agency meetings over the week, communications across teams were run through the slack App, allowing students instant feedback and crits as they went along. This also provided the tutors with a running commentary on how the week was progressing.

Edrington's Jason Craig announced the winning work, with Team Lewis just pipping Team Teviot to the top prize. Team Lewis will now get to work with Edrington on the Highland Park brand.  The other teams all received Highland Park goodies and a great deal of praise.  As it turned out, all five teams were separated by only a handful of points, based on Edrington's judging criteria (i.e. based on exactly whats covered in the brief). Having worked with our students before (on Cutty Sark in 2013), they had a good idea of the kind of work to expect, but were really blown away by the quality and depth of ideas the students managed to produce in less than a week.

This was our ninth project of this kind, and the client and the agencies were again impressed with the professionalism and creative energy of all the students - the opportunity for this level of employer engagement is central to the curriculum offering on the course.  I'll post up samples from all the work soon, and there some examples here -


Jason Craig gives some insightful feedback to Team Neish.


Team Lewis #vikingconquerors


Team Lewis #vikingconquerors


Team Lewis #vikingconquerors


Team Teviot #vikingsoul


Team Teviot #vikingsoul