Edinburgh College Art & Design students will compete to impress an Edinburgh band with their design skills at a gig at The Mash House tonight.
Continue reading Students face the music with record cover designs
Tag: students
Fortune favours graphic design students
Edinburgh College’s graphic design students got the chance to work with some of the city’s leading agencies on a real client brief as part of their annual intensive one-week challenge. Continue reading Fortune favours graphic design students
Students design cover for BBC History magazine
Illustration students at Edinburgh College are helping draw attention to the year’s top history books through artwork featured in the Christmas issue of BBC History Magazine. Continue reading Students design cover for BBC History magazine
Edinburgh at the double at CDN Awards
Edinburgh College honoured at further education sector awards
Edinburgh College scooped two awards at the College Development Network (CDN) Annual Awards last week. Continue reading Edinburgh at the double at CDN Awards
All the fun of the fair
Students bring all the fun of the Christmas fair to Edinburgh College
Edinburgh College students are spreading festive cheer by organising Christmas fairs at the college’s Granton and Sighthill campuses – and are inviting local craftspeople, staff and students to take a stall. Continue reading All the fun of the fair
College construction students raise the roof!
Edinburgh College construction training awards celebrate student achievement
Edinburgh College’s construction department raised the roof as students who have proved they are built of the right stuff were celebrated at the college’s annual training awards. Continue reading College construction students raise the roof!
Trust us: students design branding for new charity building
Edinburgh College students produce logo for Gorebridge Beacon
One of Scotland’s newest and most striking buildings has taken the latest step from drawing board to a reality with the help of two young trainee graphic designers from Edinburgh College.
The Gorebridge Community Development Trust, a volunteer-led charity that supports local economic and social regeneration, is creating a new £2.2m centre (above) and enlisted students Rhys McGeary and Liam Henderson to create its new brand identity.
The designers took the name suggested through a competition, the Gorebridge Beacon, and worked it up into a new logo that symbolises the point of the new centre, which opens next year (below). The new centre will provide affordable, subsidised business space for rental with meeting rooms, flexible conferencing and learning space, a community cafe, a Sure Start nursery and a youth space, giving the town of Gorebridge a major boost.
Stephanie Walker, co-chair of the Gorebridge Community Development Trust, said: “The Gorebridge Beacon is all about giving people a new start and making their lives better. Graphic design is a fiercely competitive career and getting started on your career can be extremely challenging. By working together, we’ve got a really professional product and the two designers have got something really solid and impressive in their portfolios which will hopefully give them a head start in establishing themselves as excellent creative designers.”
The designers, Rhys and Liam, both from Musselburgh, volunteered to help the trust through their course tutor Chris Hughes at Edinburgh College, where they are in the final year of the HND Visual Communication: Graphic Design course.
Rhys, Liam and the trust narrowed four approaches down to one final design, and this brand identity will now be used across the centre’s website, social media presence, signage and promotional material. It reflects the aspirations of the trust for the contribution the new complex will make in terms of improving lives in the community. The centre has to pay its own way in terms of attracting tenants for the centre’s office spaces and ensuring as many people as possible come in to use the centre’s cafe, performance spaces, youth rooms, nursery and meeting rooms.
Chris Hughes said: “This partnership worked really well for everyone – the development trust got access to highly skilled design professionals and our students got the chance to work on live commissions and see their work being put into place in a real world commercial setting.”
Rhys said: “The client brief was really interesting but challenging. In terms of the people the centre has to attract, because it offers so many different things – from the cafe to conference venues and offices for hire – the audiences are all ages, from school pupils, to teenagers right up to older people, from charities to professional businesses.
“The trust were also clear that they wanted something that reflected both the building, its name, and its ambitious social purpose.”
Liam said: “Getting a design right involves a lot of discussion while ensuring that the end product has purpose and meaning. It will help the client achieve their purpose such as summarising quickly the point of something to helping people get more familiar with the centre and more likely to use it.”
Stephanie Walker added: “Given all the Trust is doing, making this centre work is and continues to be a challenge for our small volunteer-led trust and that won’t get any easier when we open our doors as we will have difficult targets to reach. That’s where a good brand identity and excellent promotional work will pay off and we’ve been grateful to our supporters for their assistance, in particular Midlothian Council which has seconded Stephen Fraser to us part-time.”
“Stephen brought Edinburgh College in and we’re really grateful for their help. Rhys and Liam have listened carefully to our views and worked with board members to come up with a logo and other materials that neatly summarises our hopes for what the centre will provide for Gorebridge when it opens.”
The actual building of the £2.2m centre, known as capital development, has been funded from grants provided by the Big Lottery Fund, Social Investment Scotland and Midlothian Council, with the trust having to repay a loan once the centre is up and running, making it vital that the development is embraced by the Gorebridge community and used fully.
Taste of success: College cookery students share their wares instore
Cookery students help make Aldi opening event taste great
Edinburgh College Professional Cookery students gave customers at the new Aldi store in Tranent a taste of the skills they have picked up on their course at the shop’s opening day event.
The students braved the cold October weather to prepare tasters of recipes they had prepared using Aldi products. Customers were delighted to sample butternut squash soup, chocolate tarts, tandoori salmon with naan bread, and beef tagliata, and snapped up recipe cards to use at home.
The students demonstrated their preparation techniques when dishing the recipes and walked around the store to serve tasters to customers. This is the second store opening the students have attended, following the opening of the Cowdenbeath store last month, and gave them great practical experience and the chance to engage directly with customers and hear their positive feedback.
The five students are all studying SVQ Level 2 Professional Cookery at the college. Their course prepares them for working in the professional cookery industry by pairing training in food preparation and restaurant service. Students use these skills working in the college’s Granton Campus canteen and the two training restaurants, The Apprentice and eh15.
Student Kerry Robertson said: “This has been a really great opportunity to work and show off what we’ve learned on our course. I don’t have a job in the catering industry yet, so events like these give me the experience I need to take to future employers. I’ve been serving the samples to the customers today and had some really nice comments.”
Lecturers Chris Cockburn and George Baker accompanied the students. George said “We’re really grateful to Aldi for giving us the opportunity to help out with their store opening. It’s valuable for us as a college and for the students, as it lets people know just how high quality our students and teaching are.”
Pictured: Professional Cookery students James Baigan, Alastair MacKay, Alannah Ramsay, Douglas McGovern and Kerry Robertson outside the new Aldi store.
Six of the best for College students!
Graphics students learn from the best in new Edinburgh College design partnership
Some of the city’s top design agencies have teamed up with Edinburgh College to show students the inner workings of the industry and help them become the next professional stars.
Six design agencies have signed up to a new partnership scheme with the college to give graphic design students industry experience and insight while they are still studying. Mentors from the agencies will coach students over the next year, giving them work placements, setting them briefs and advising on projects including work for real clients.
The agencies – Whitespace; Blonde; Teviot; Union Direct; Equator; and LEWIS – will in turn get access to the best graduates, working with them to ensure their skills and knowledge meet the needs of the industry and support its growth.
The new partnership builds on the success of the HND Visual Communication: Graphic Design course’s existing mentorship programme, which has been pairing students with mentors for the last seven years and now works with 13 agencies. The six agencies now signed up as official partners will provide further opportunities over and above mentoring so students can experience all sides of the industry, as well as sponsoring the students’ end-of-year show.
The project launched with an event at the college’s Granton Campus, where students got to meet their mentors for the first time.
Graphic design lecturer Helena Good said: “Bringing the design agencies on board as partners will be great for the students as it gives them new ways of getting the knowledge about the industry that they’ll need when they enter the workplace. Having access to professionals working to incredibly high standards in the latest practices, including digital, and getting their honest feedback and guidance is invaluable to their development.
“The mentoring project we started seven years ago has really taken off, and we’re lucky to have so many great companies so keen to be involved. Formalising these partnerships is a natural step and really embeds this project and the students themselves firmly within the city’s design community.”
As well as allotted time with mentors throughout the year, some partners will provide up to a month’s worth of work experience placements. They will also each set groups of students one-day ‘guerilla’ design projects, where mentors will turn up unannounced in the morning and set a design challenge to be completed in a day. Mentors also help students work on intensive one-week design projects working on real briefs from real clients, which in previous years have included Innis & Gunn, Edinburgh Zoo and GF Smith.
One of the mentors at partner Teviot, Kirsten Murray, who studied the HND at the college and graduated in 2007, said: “Whatever stage you are at in your education or career, having a mentor to support you, challenge you and ask you hard questions is invaluable. I have watched the mentoring programme go from strength to strength over the last five years. The success of the programme is clear when you see the quality of the ideas and the design work being produced by the students.
“As a former student of Edinburgh College, it means a lot to me to be able to give something back to the very place that kick started my career in design. The future of design in Scotland will soon be in the hands of these students. That’s why it’s so important that we help them to become industry-ready graduates.”
Student Alex De Sousa, 18, from Bonnyrigg, said: “This doesn’t happen anywhere else and it’s really exciting. It’s incredible that we get to spend time one to one with people with such great experience and it’s such a good opportunity.”
Gillian Grant, an account director at LEWIS, said: “The more you work with and get to know the students the more you can see that they are hungry to learn in all areas. There’s lots they can learn from an account management and project management perspective to complement the creative side and help them understand all sides of the industry. You can offer process-driven advice and recommendations on pitching, and demonstrate how all areas of an agency work together to achieve a goal.”
Czech mates! Muirhouse welcomes European students
Czech students make Muirhouse Millennium Centre home
Today we welcome our second group of students from the Czech Republic Students to the Centre ((writes James McGinty). Last week’s group stayed all week and included ‘Sunday Learning’ in the large Hall. Both groups planned to visit the Capital of the North – Inverness – with a ‘Nessie Hunt’ trip to Loch Ness!
We would like to thank St Andrews & the Old Kirk for their help in catering to the educational needs of the students by providing ‘learning rooms’ due to the large number of Students, as our Centre continues to be ambassadors for both Edinburgh and Scotland.