welovedesignetc
The design courses blog for BA (Hons)
and HND Vis Comm at Edinburgh College

D&AD University Network

22 February 2010

I attended a D&AD University Network meeting last week at Edinburgh Art College. along with tutors from Glasgow School of Art, ECA and Gray's.

Laura and Rhiannon from D&AD presented samples of the new D&AD website, and talked us through some important new features that Network members will be able to use. These included the portfolio resource where we'll be able to upload and exhibit up to 14 pieces per project!

D&AD are very keen that we exhibit at New Blood in London, where there will be 175 stands (including ours) and 1000's of agency people. They also brought up a couple of useful pointers about submitting briefs -

Firstly, that the judges are looking for something that's never been done before, and which takes risks without alienating the client.

Secondly, try to steer clear of the obvious briefs - posters and big name clients. You are more likely to get your work noticed on the more unusual briefs, particularly the digital ones. Great advice!




Archiving for Web

20 February 2010

You should be archiving all your finished print work as 300ppi PDF files. These files should go in the assessments Drive under assessments/designarchive/your_HND_year.

You should also get into the habit of preparing web-formated JPG copies of your work so that they can be posted here on the blog, or uploaded to your own portfolio website. This is important, because your final project, and all future projects in Years 1 and 2 will contain a requirement for this process.

The link below goes to a detailed set of guidelines on how to resize and save your work for the web - Archiving Guidelines.





Probably the Best Job in the World...

19 February 2010

The BBC only launched their customisable website last year, and are currently getting a grilling about the way they spend our money, but they still have the budget to hire Neville Brody's Research Studios to overhaul their digital output.

The collaboration will see a huge re-design of the BBC's online presence, which they are calling a 'Global Visual Language'. The brief is to take the organisation and its users into a more compelling digital space.

BBC Embedded Media visual

Brody has been tasked with re-inventing the typography, colour palette and iconography of the BBC's online branding.

The studio is currently in the process of consolidating all the work into a styleguide that can then be used across the whole range of BBC output - in effect a new set of branding guidelines. As part of this monumental re-vamp, it looks like Brody has also been tweaking the BBC's established typeface - Gill Sans.

On the Research Studio website, Brody called it 'probably the best job in the world ', and said that 'the core approach has been to find a simple, modern and compelling experience based around dramatic and scalable editorial concepts.'

Research Studios also posted up some brilliant examples of the work-in-progress, including typographic studies, colour wheel samples, layout ideas and an amazing array of vector icons. Check out some of the examples:

Program previews

Icons

Program previews

Sample palette

More:
Research Studios BBC work-in-progress