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

Cool HND 2 T-Shirts

19 December 2010

It's not exactly t-shirt weather, but our HND 2 students finished off the year by designing their annual review t-shirts. In what has become a bit of a tradition, these t-shirts display one thing they have learned or specialised in during the semester.

The standouts last year were Artur Pasiek's 'SWISS' and Hannah Bloomfield's designer black, featuring the CMYK rich black values 30 30 30 100.

This time around my favourites are Emma Hart's 'I Love Ampersands' and Gill McColl's 'Grid System'. Ideal Christmas presents - where can I buy one :)

hnd 2 t shirts


Rachel is a One Hour Winner

17 December 2010

HND Year 2 student Rachel Patrick has won the London Design Festival's one hour typography competition. The LDF asked designers to select a quote from a list of 80 quotes on design, and create a typographical poster in just one hour.

After a huge response in entries, the LDF's William Shaw and Richard Wolfströme, designer and Board member of the International Society of Typographic Designers, chose five winners.

Rachel took American designer Joe Sparano's quote 'Good design is obvious, great design is transparent', and came up with this -




You can see the other winning entries and the judges' comments at www.londondesignfestival.com, and you can check out Rachel's portfolio on her new website www.bypatch.co.uk


14 Weeks Review Visuals

16 December 2010

Examples of Jonathan Walton's winning entry for '14 Weeks and Counting'.

Jonathan's campaign, entitled 'Installing Designer...', uses clever wordplay and an instantly recognisable digital dialogue message to create a humorous and effective concept that obviously appealed to the target audience.

Concept

Poster:


Banners:



Invite:



T-Shirt:



Rescheduled Review!

15 December 2010

Congratulations to Jonathan Walton, who secured the bulk of votes from HND 2 to win our '14 Weeks and Counting' campaign.

Jonathan's concept of 'Installing Designer...' just edged out Jody Hogg's 'Discovering Concepts', closely followed by Alistair Kerr's 'Finding Yourself' and Michelle Becker's 'Design Recipe'.

Jonathan's work will be integrated into the final campaign visuals for the Review, which will now take place on Wed 12th January. Samples from all four students will be posted up later this week.


Showing Racism the Red Card, with Type

14 December 2010

Today we managed another nice get-together for the NC classes - this time in the Hub alongside HND 1, whose 'Show Racism the Red Card' video work was shown on the giant multiscreen.

All the submissions were strong, and we have a great chance of following up Ross Duncan's win last year with another award.

Two real standout submissions came from Jordan Porteous and Sarah Tucker. Jordan opted for a dynamic typography animation and an inventive poster -









Sarah also went with a typographical solution. Inspired by Stefan Sagmeister, and with a little help from her friends, she produced this remarkable video and its accompanying poster work -






NC Project Assessment

13 December 2010

It doesn't happen very often, but four of the Design Tutors got together with both NC classes to assess the final NC project for 2010 - the campaign for our rescheduled '14 Weeks and Counting' Review.

After a short crit, both classes mounted and exhibited their work and were give the opportunity to vote on a winning submission.

Later this week, HND 1 and HND 2 will get their chance to vote on the work, and a final winner will be announced on Wednesday. The winning work will be integrated into the print media campaign and the website at www.etcshow.net.

The winning submission after the first round of votes is Jody Hogg for her 'Discovering Concepts' idea, which featured a dazzling 4 X A3 skyscraper banner. Well done!

Once the HN votes are, in we'll post some of the submissions in the gallery.


Grafik 187

9 December 2010

If any of you joined the Grafik mailing list following the magazine's demise in July 2010, you'll have received a nice email today - the full 100-page pdf of the unpublished final issue from June 2010.

As with all issues of Grafik, it's beautifully laid out and brilliantly typeset, with lots of great articles and some amazing work by many of today's leading graphic designers. Contents for issue 187 include a main feature on book design and a special report on fashion illustration.

The magazine is now under new ownership by the original editorial team, and will be re-launched in print and online in early 2011.

I've put a copy of the pdf in my tutorials drive.

Grafik 187


Schering Her Experience

7 December 2010

Despite the horrendous snow, today a number of our NC students managed to get in and work on their final project of the year, '14 Weeks and Counting' - the exhibition campaign for the HND end-of-year review.

To get them back into studio mode we watched this five minute interview with Paula Scher, which sums up much about what it means to be a graphic designer.

Scher talks about her student days, her relationship with clients, and her realisation that graphic design is all about solving problems.

Her trademark work features unusual typography and hand-drawn cartography. During the 1970's, she designed hundreds of record covers for CBS, most of which, she claims, taught her 'what bad is, and how it got that way'. She also famously claimed during those years that if a designer used Helvetica, they supported the Vietnam War.

Nowadays, Scher is a partner at the Pentagram Agency in New York.







Review Rescheduling

6 December 2010

With the ongoing weather problems, the Design Team has decided to reschedule the Review. It will take place early next block.

In the meantime, the NC students will still work on their campaign designs, and we'll vote on the winner towards the end of next week.

All Year 1 and 2 deadlines have been extended as well. If anyone has any work they want direction on please email myself or Helena with the pdf files. Hopefully the college will be open tomorrow. You can keep up-to-date with developments via Telford's twitter feed.


Talkspace 01

2 December 2010

Scotland's Design Agency of the Year for 2010, Whitespace, recently hosted Talkspace 01 - an event aimed at allowing local designers to share ideas and debate the current concerns of the industry.

Our HND students Adam MacDonald and Emma Hart went along and were really inspired by the community of practice and by the general vibes.

The inaugural event featured Mark Ecob, book designer and erstwhile art director at Canongate; Johanna Basford, a talented designer/illustrator; and Neil McGuire, from Glasgow agency AfterTheNews. All three talked about their work and their experiences of the industry, and chaired an informal Q & A afterwards.

You can check out the whole talk on vimeo here.

More:
Johanna Basford
Mark Ecob
AfterTheNews