Hasta La Ideas

Over the course of this year’s degree show season, CR readers will be guest blogging reviews of shows up and down the UK (and beyond). Maisie Benson takes a look at the Falmouth Graphic Design show

This year, as always, the Falmouth University Graphic Design show boasts a plethora of brilliant and varied ideas and solutions. I’ve selected a few of my favourite pieces of work to try and capture a glimpse of the talent but I would fully recommend seeing the full show when it opens to the public on the June 15.

Chulley Evans
One piece of work that really stood out to me was Chulley Evans’ poster campaign for Douwe Egberts. The brief was to advertise Douwe Egberts to a younger target market and Chulley decided to focus her campaign on the relationship between coffee lovers and their coffee. She showed this loyalty with a really simple visual play on a coffee cup handle becoming a wedding ring, this is reinforced by her choice of copy which works really nicely in both the context of vows and for coffee.

Emma Chilcott
I love Emma Chilcott’s response to the D&AD brief to design the packaging for four scents from L’Artisan Parfumeur, each capturing a different emotion. Emma created L’Art de L’Emotion – a range of perfume paints that can be mixed to express your emotions using colour and scent. I think her solution is a really elegant outcome for quite an intricate, challenging brief.

Trevor Thompson
Trevor Thompson’s book cover design for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep also caught my eye. I think this cover achieves a good balance between engaging the viewer without giving away too much of the plot. It gradually acquires further meaning as the book is read, it hints at the idea that whilst some women in the book may prove to be key to unlocking information in the case, others may be concealing far more deadly secrets.

Anthony Goodison
One really simple but effective solution was Anthony Goodison’s campaign for the Feel Good Drinks Company. Anthony took well known positive phrases and used the urban environment to engage with viewers and bring a smile to their day.

Conor Dorsett
Conor Dorsett decided to tackle the JKR Juice competition to brand and package a global urban beekeeper’s products. Conor focused his branding on how urban honey is shaped by the city it is created in, this he showed very simply by forming city skylines out of honey drops. I think this outcome would be really effective on shelf as the skylines would align and create the impression of an entire city.

Sarah Knight
Sarah Knight tackled the same Douwe Egberts brief as Chulley, above, but with a completely different outcome. Sarah focussed on redesigning the coffee’s packaging to bring it, quite literally, into the home. I think Sarah’s designs work really nicely as a set and would be really hard to resist!

Paul Ransom
Along the same lines as being hard to resist, I really liked Paul Ransom’s Duracell redesign. Paul has created a different personality for each battery type based on their size and nature of use.

Josie Evans
Josie Evans’ self-initiated brief was to create a campaign to highlight issues surrounding food wastage as well as providing cheap and easy solutions to the problem. Josie created a clever sleeve to fit over various products to show just how much is wasted out of each item bought. Each sleeve contains a recipe that could be made using the potentially wasted product, if all of the sleeves are collected they can be arranged to create a full poster with various facts and information about food wastage. I love how many different levels there are to Josie’s outcome and I think it is a really effective and practical solution.

Thanks to Maisie Benson whose work can be seen here

Pink Floyd fans may recognise the cover of our June issue. It’s the original marked-up artwork for Dark Side of the Moon: one of a number of treasures from the archive of design studio Hipgnosis featured in the issue, along with an interview with Aubrey Powell, co-founder of Hipgnosis with the late, great Storm Thorgerson. Elsewhere in the issue we take a first look at The Purple Book: Symbolism and Sensuality in Contemporary Illustration, hear from the curators of a fascinating new V&A show conceived as a ‘walk-in book’ plus we have all the regular debate and analysis on the world of visual communications.

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