UKskills are an organisation who each year hold a series of competitions across all colleges and sixth form colleges in the United Kingdom. In 2006, Derby College’s graphic design course swept the board and won gold, silver and bronze with it’s entries and as a result, UKSkills asked us to design the invitations for the award ceremony.
For last year’s D&AD Awards, one of the briefs set was for an underground-culture pack called ‘Don’t Panic’, they are produced monthly and can be found in selected independent retailers around the UK containing flyers from the top clubs in the area, promotions for up-and-coming musicians, and each month has a different theme decided by it’s online fan-base.
For the brief, they asked for a series of postcards to be designed for a theme titled ‘The Edge’. Now the edge, as they stated, ‘could be anywhere, both imaginary or real’, giving an enormous freedom to the possibilities. I instantly started dreaming of fantastic fantasy worlds where anything could happen, but as with most projects, there was a short turn-around time, and I had to settle for a piece of Photoshop wizardry in bringing my world to life, and as a result I created this world where everything almost looks normal, until you start noticing little things like the miniature taxi and geese crossing at the traffic lights (..and yes, the red traffic light is now green!).
For a closer look, you can download a higher resolution version here – dontpanic.jpg
This is one of my self-initiated projects. In my hometown of Derby, there has been a lot of regeneration recently and masses of concrete has been erected in the form of enormous buildings and shopping centres, destroying any greenery in it’s path.
As a form of protest, I took my scalpel out and designed some large-scale stencils, and to bring back some sort of nature to the city, I made vast expanses of leafy vines that scaled up and across, over and under (as vines often tend to do) and tried to cover as much as I could!
Unfortunately, within about a day, the weed-killer (in the form of graffiti removers) had decimated the vines. But such was the impact of this work, that I was inundated with requests for smaller versions of work on canvasses, and here is one of the examples I managed to find the other day whilst rummaging at home.
I recently submitted this as an entry on ‘WeLoveYourWalls.com’, an online competition where artists submit their work to compete for the chance to get it printed professionally and sold on the website, so your votes would be very very welcome, Im not doing too badly at the moment, but the more votes the better!!
http://www.weloveyourwalls.com/php/index.php?show=vote&purl=
Each year, Derby College holds a summer exhibition of their students’ work.
Last year, the people in charge decided to call it ‘Showing Off’ (God only knows why!), but we were handed the task of designing entries to compete for the prize of having our poster being used around the city to attract visitors.
My simple entry was based purely on ‘Showing Off’ and creating visual impact when placed beside other advertisements around the city, and seemed to do so enough to be declared the winner.
Last year, Banko Santander, who recently bought Abbey National, came to us to design them a brand for their all singing, all dancing, new student card. They left the name totally upto us, and we were able to create absolutely anything for the finished article. My brand was called ‘Garnet’, and it took inspiration from the card’s multi-use element. Its ability to be used for banking, student identification, library and travel, made it a valuable asset to any student, so therefore I named it after a precious jewel and took the aesthetics from the warmth and treasure aspects of rare jewels.
The planned poster campaign were very minimal, to create curiosity in those who did not know about the card, but those who were in the know, would feel as though their card was a secret only to them.
The main value of the brand was it’s strong sense of warmth. Students don’t have a lot of luxuries in their lives, so to give them something nice would make it very attractive, and then with it being an important part of their lives I created the brand guidelines with the intention to make it on the level of the student, due to the fact that most students feel unable to talk to their banks with the financial strain university puts them through.
You can download a copy of the brand guidelines here… garnet_brand_guidelines.pdf
(If you do decide to steal any of the ideas used here, the earnest is on the word ‘STEAL’ there, and whereas I will be somewhat flattered by you using my work, you will always know in yourself that you are an inferior designer for not being able to do it yourself …so unlucky, hope you can live with that!)
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