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.

Pure Joy

HND Graphic Design student Joy Mooney took the Breakthrough Award at the DMA awards recently in London. The DMA Breakthrough Awards runs in partnership with the DMA Awards and GRT.



This year, Direct Line supplied the brief, which was to re-position Direct Line to a younger target audience for new car insurance by building awareness of the brand and increasing understanding of 'black box' insurance. We managed to produce all three finalists with Joy being joined by Natasha Ryan and Blanca Jiminez.

All three travelled down to London with tutor Helena Good to pitch their ideas to the judging panel, ahead of attending the Awards.  Joy took the top prize but Natasha and Blanca shared the joint Silver prize - a huge achievement all round for our student creatives.

DMA Breakthrough Finalists

Huge congratulations to Blanca Jiminez, Natasha Ryan and Joy Mooney who have all been announced as finalists for the DMA Breakthrough Award for their work on the Direct Line brief.

The three final year students will be travelling down to London during the first week in December, along with tutor Helena Good, to pitch their idea to the DMA panel, and then attend the awards night on Dec 4th!

Into Orbit

HND Year 2 recently finished a short poster project set by former graduates Kyle McPartlin and Kiera Winfield, both designers at Edinburgh agency Orbit.

They set a brief to explore the word 'collaboration', and the class were tasked with each designing a single A3 poster using the risograph process. We exhibited the work in the hub and also invited along Johnny Gailey, who runs Out of the Blueprint studio in Leith, and specialise in riso printing and facilitated the production of the work.

Kyle and Kiera are due to announce a winner of the project next week, and that will guarantee one talented student a placement at Orbit.  Some sample risos from the project -