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
