Hasta La Ideas

The graphics courses at Norwich UCA have a decidedly practical focus, producing degree shows full of brand identities and packaging projects. This year’s show was particularly strong

There are three graphics courses at NUCA, showing together in the University College’s St Georges Street building: Graphic Communications, Graphic Design and Design for Publishing.

From the latter, comes Chris Cole, although his stand-out project is actually a brand identity, for the RAF Museum.

I also enjoyed Liam Drane‘s set of Charles Bukowski covers

Samantha Kerr created this range of manly Old Spice products, which won her the Design Bridge Award earlier this year

and this range of Monster energy drinks

From Michael Law comes this identity for 21 Club, an upmarket cocktail bar

Simon Jefferis and David Clulow work jointly as togetherandapart. In response to an RSA brief asking students to identify a journey and improve it, Jefferis created Shake Five, a game that gives users points when they shake hands or high-five someone. The game would use a wristband with an accelerometer inside to link to an app.

He also produced this interactive poster: hit the disc and it says “Great job buddy! 10 points!”

Working together, the same pair also produced this poster promoting Lance Wyman’s recent show at NUCA, which cleverly references Wyman’s use of pictograms but introduces Norwich landmarks into them

Adam Jewson also incorporated app design in his identity for Veg Patch, a greengrocer selling home-grown produce

Steve Burtenshaw proposed a clever new identity for Habitat, built on the idea of ‘nesting’

Emma Raimbach‘s campaign for the Science Museum’s Hidden Heroes show was beautifully done, combining the Johnson Banks identity with hand-drawn illustrations by Hollie Crofts Morris, a third year illustration student at NUCA.

While Gary Beare showed two nice identity projects, one for the city of Belfast

and the other for Tango

And Beth Drummond created this lovely packaging for Waitrose chocolates

Becki Turner’s campaign for Fedrigoni paper was bright and witty

As was Alexander Harazim’s Sunny Delight project (also shown top)

If I had one criticism it would be that I would have liked to have seen more examples on the main displays of how projects incorporated digital media, particularly the web. The two projects above that incorporated apps really stood out in this respect. Otherwise it was another very strong showing from NUCA graphics.

The show website is here. Private view is tonight (June 26) with the show open to the public from June 27 to July 3, details here.

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