Hasta La Ideas

Around 70 courses are represented at this year’s D&AD New Blood graduate show in London’s Spitalfields market. We pick out a few highlights

Last year’s New Blood – D&AD’s annual group graduate show – was overwhelming, with a huge amount of content packed into a very tight space. This year brings an improved layout, with bigger stands and more space allowing a little more room for the work to breathe and the indivudal colleges to make an impression.

Southampton Solent’s Illustration stand (above) did just that. Branded as The Woolly Bully Illustration Show it combined some great work with really impressive display.

Each illustrator had their own badge, plus there were free posters and a very well-produced catalogue.

I particularly liked this from Dan Murphy

This print by the intriguingly-named Rake

And this by Char Cox

Check out the course’s Tumblr site here

Along with incoming D&AD President Laura Jordan Bambach and Rob from It’s Nice That, I was judging ‘best stand’ at New Blood yesterday. We all thought Solent’s was brilliant but in the end gave the top prize to Sheffield Hallam Graphic Design which managed to tie a lot of disparate work together with its clever use of background graphics.

They’d also thought the whole stand experience through really well, from the individual cardboard boxes housing each student’s work to the orange stands for printed work.

Check out our review of the main Sheffield Hallam show here

Ulster’s Design for Visual Communications course took a novel approach, showcasing its students’ entries to the D&AD V&A brief in these architectural models

And Gray’s School of Art tackled the ‘massed ranks of black portfolios’ conundrum with this plywood carousel

A word too for Norwich Graphic Communication. Showing any screenbased work in this environment is really tough – particularly when you have stands full of screenprints and type to compete with. Norwich attempted to make the whole experience a little more playful with this control device to switch between films randomly. You just wanted to press it.

There’s a separate review of the main Norwich show here

On the Staffordshire Univeristy Graphics & Illustration stand I liked Helen Player’s porcelain ampersand, part of her response to the D&AD V&A student awards brief. In fact, here were a lot of great physical objects this year, including this amazing boat by Thomas Wightman at Edinburgh Napier. It’s his final project, entitled Anchored, and is aimed at helping “helping OCD sufferers stopping the tide and disruption that is associated with the obsessions and anxiety related with the illness”.

And what about this ‘chest’ of drawers by George McCallum of University of the West of England Illustration

At the Arts University Bournemouth Graphic Design stand, Lewis Simper displayed this oddly fascinating device for warning of imminent attacks in South Korea. “Taking inspiration from Gustav Klutsis’s Maquette for Radio-Announcer, I designed and produced a public announcement system that would be placed in public areas around Korea as a warning for those to evacuate at a time when there was extreme tension between the countries, in April 2013,” he says of the project.

On the same stand, I also liked Grace Bond’s Imprint, Bruise, Graze, a series of three shirts embroidered with each

On the Arts Uiversity of Bournemouth Visual Communications course, a team of Joshua Ogden, Callum Best, Malin Hassel, Luke Patton, and James Smith tackled the D&AD BBC brief, creating BBC Suitcase, by which users of BBC online services can customise the experience. “Think of the Suitcase as a vessel for all the sites’ content, your own personal case in which you can pack all your favourite programmes and categories. The Suitcase also automatically updates its contents so you can use it to follow stories and articles as they develop. Whether the content is new or old, with Suitcase you can engage with the BBC in a style that feels alive and relevant to you.”

A couple of projects at the University of Greenwich caught my eye: toilet roll packaging from Angela and Luca (aka We Are NOone)

Angela Hayrabedyan of NOone, Rita Sulaman and Benjamin Butler also created this Innocent campaign

And at the Kingston Illustration and Animation stand, amid a lot of great work, I liked Alix Holden‘s DIY blocks

and Milo Targett‘s film

And finally there was James Dyer of Huddersfield University who hooked up a keyboard to a monitor to create a ‘playable’ animation whereby a figure moved according to which key was pressed

This is just a smattering of the work on show, and I’ve treid to stick to courses that we have not already covered elsewhere on the site this year. If you are based in London, or can get there before the show closes tomorrow night (July 4), I heartily encourage you to do so. It’s a much better experience than last year with a huge amount of exciting work to see. Details here

Oh, and some really nice exhibition design by Kin

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The July issue of Creative Review is a type special, with features on the Hamilton Wood Type Museum, the new Whitney identity and the resurgence of type-only design. Plus the Logo Lounge Trend Report, how Ideas Foundation is encouraging diversity in advertising and more