One Night Stand Event Nomination

Our 2013 graduate show, 'One Night Stand', has made the shortlist for Best Educational Event at the 2013 Scottish Event Awards. Our concept, to reinvent the graduate show format by exhibiting for a single evening only, produced a full house at the Traverse Theatre Bar, attracting more than 100 advertising and design professionals from 47 of Edinburgh's best agencies and studios.





The awards ceremony will be held on Thursday 26th September at the Crowne Plaza Hotel, Glasgow. The full list of nominations is available on the Scottish Event Awards website.

Creative Exchange

Thursday of last week Creative Exchange officially launched - Edinburgh’s new workspace for creatives and digital media specialists. The project, a collaboration between Edinburgh City Council and Edinburgh College, is aimed at providing the creative community in Edinburgh with flexible, state-of-the-art studio space. The impressive facilities, situated in the heart of Leith in a former Victorian Corn Exchange, are spread across three floors and include 4G broadband, superb AV meeting rooms, and a range of business support services.

There was a great turnout on launch night, with creatives, business leaders, freelancers and educators all getting their a first look at the awesome space. Our Graphic Design students, alongside Photography and Computer Arts, exhibited a range of work for the opening night, and as part of this project, we've been offered some dedicated space for workshops, seminars and pitches. The branding for Creative Exchange was also designed by HND graphics graduate Jonathan Walton.

Creative Exchange will hopefully be a great new resource for the creative community, and there are already a number of agencies and organisations using the space. Check out the feedback from the launch night via Storify. Full details and pricing plans are available on the website at www.creativeechangeleith.com

DO:25 / D&AD

It's almost the end of another teaching year, so we are signing off with a great piece of work from HND students' Alistair Kerr and Hussain Al-Khirsan's D&AD Best of Year - the Open brief for the Dept. of Health. Hussain has just completed a placement at Heedi Design, and will be finishing off his degree in Graphic Design at Duncan of Jordanstone, whilst Alistair is now a junior designer at RAPP in Edinburgh. Well done guys, see you at Graduation.



The complete entry for this work, along with our other awards for 2012/13, will be on exhibit at the opening of Edinburgh's Creative Exchange, on July 11th.

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 

Star Creative Student 2013

We are celebrating another piece of awards success today, as student Jonathan Walton won Star Creative Student at the annual Marketing Society Scotland Star Awards in Glasgow last night. This is the second consecutive win by a student from our course in this particular award.


Jonathan Walton receives his Star Creative Award from The Union's Dawn Kermani.

The full list of winners is now available to view on the Marketing Society's website.You can check our Jonathan's winning work here.

More:
Star Creative Winner - Edinburgh Reporter

One Night Stand Looked Like this

Huge thanks to our resident photographer Derek Anderson whose keen eye captured the celebratory mood of our sell-out graduate show, One Night Stand, at Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre Bar.

Derek Anderson / Nikon D600

You can check out some samples of the student work on our Pinterest Show Page, and read a nice review of the event by Pete Bastiman in the DRUM.