D&AD – New Blood Winner

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Massive congratulations to Hasan Lokhat for his wooden pencil win at this year’s D&AD New Blood Awards.

Hasan answered the Top Trumps brief, and in his words:

Top Trumps are trying to tap into the 18-25 audience, to achieve this, I am pitching an idea that involves Top Trumps partnering with Spotify.

Spotify Wrapped is released in December every year. People share it on social media and brag about what they listen to. We are going to turn this into a Top Trumps competition. By using Spotify Wrapped’s data, each user will receive their own personal Top Trumps Card.

Spotify’s AI engine will pitch users against others daily.

Build your collection of TopTrump TopSpot cards and aim to win as many as you can. At the end of the game the player who holds the coveted TopSpot will win an exclusive, one of a kind deck of TopTrumps cards, consisting of the top most streamed artists on Spotify, personally signed by each Artist or Band.

PRESENTATION

RESEARCH

Packaging

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The graphic design first years have finished their second semester packaging project.

A new take on the brief itself involved taking a closer look at the world of cereal packaging, and creatively design a box of cereal on behalf of a given client, event or audience.

The student could choose the most appropriate cereal (cold or hot) for their client. The solution could be achieved through three-dimensional design, surface graphics or a combination of both.

airbnb – Copos [translated from ‘flake’ in spanish’]

Queen’s platinum jubilee

Warburtons

sunday times

Warburton’s

airbnb

pet rodent owners

pride

winter olympic games

The sunday times

glastonbury festival

Open Day Faces – Take 2

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Here we feature a second selection of typeface illustrations by prospective graphics students who recently joined us in our studio. Some interesting takes on what we bill as our “fun with with fonts” project. Hopefully everyone gained an insight into what we do and how the course works.

Minimum Means Maximum Effect

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Here we feature some ground work examples for an up and coming Year 1 project . The one day studio workshop will be held in he Autumn term of academic year 2022/23.

The brief will involve giving each student one well known brand element and working in black and white only, on an A3 canvas, we will be asking the students to play and create as many images as they can using their given element.

They will be encouraged to use and explore a basic design palette of scale, reflection, multiples, proportion, space and layout to create as many interesting and intriguing images as they can in 4 to 5 hours.

A selection of well known brand elements

Open Day Faces – Take 1

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Here we feature a selection of typeface illustrations by our prospective graphics students who joined us this weekend in our studios, where they gained an insight into what we do and how the course works.

Some impressive characters.

Resource Klaxon: Design Reviewed – Online Archive

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A quick nota bene regarding the latest addition to our list of archives.

Design Reviewed, recently featured on Print’s weekly roundup by Steven Heller is the collection of Matt Lamont – a fellow northerner.

In Matt’s words:

Design Reviewed is a personal project dedicated to digitally preserving graphic design history and documenting the vast visual culture from the last century.

His collection features some absolute gems, but is also thoughtfully (and no doubt pain stakingly) edited into categories and themes. Any designer would be delighted to have a percentage of his collection to learn from!

Soak it up…

A snapshot of the collection

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY TO US!

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Seventeen years ago the idea for an in-house research led printed quarterly document was hatched and the Disciples of Design was born. Over the intervening 17 years the concept has developed into an award winning blog, that at one point was attracting 30,000+ daily hits. It has gone through several iterations and one hacking and is now an invaluable teaching aid, course resource and archive of visual communications and culture.

First hand drawn word mark -circa 2004

Award certificate for Excellence in teaching & assessment

One week project: Christmas

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Here we feature a new brief for the Christmas project. It asked our first year designers to make a connection between their given client and Christmas crackers. A well known table decoration at Christmas time here in the UK that are just the type of Christmas merchandise the clients chosen would sell to help raise funds.

As a foundation in 3D thinking and packaging, the final crit (in conjunction with the use of the large format printer) delivered a pleasing range of ideas and connections; some of which are below.

London Transport Museum

The Design Museum

the comedy store

kew gardens

National History Museum

RNLI

The Design Museum

Guinness Storehouse