Currently exhibiting her work at D&AD’s new blood, Illustration student Lorna Scobie has recently won the Digital award at the Macmillan prize and scooped 2nd place at the Penguin Design Awards 2012. Below is Lorna’s account of her prize winning:

In May I was awarded the Digital award at the Macmillan pize. (http://www.panmacmillan.com/macmillanprize)

It’s an award which celebrates the best new talent in the field of Children’s picture books, and this year was the first time they awarded the ‘Digital Award’. This is really exciting because it signifies that the children’s publishing industry truly is opening it’s doors to digital books, apps and the like, and also shows that they value the importance of digital books alongside traditional books. 

I won £1000 for this award, they took me and my tutor Jane out for dinner (!) and my work was exhibited at Foyles bookshop in London for a while.

 My book, ‘Bradley’, explored the theme of concealed and unrecognised talents. Bradley’s literal glow in the dark qualities go unnoticed until a darker threat begins to emerge. The story has been designed to work as both a traditional printed book with pages that glow when held under the covers, and as a digital book. The concept for the digital version is to utilise the ability of an iPad to sense light levels, and to respond accordingly to help reveal Bradley’s secret.

 In June I came 2nd in the Penguin Design Awards 2012. I entered the Puffin Prize, and designed the book cover for Grimm’s Fairy Tales ( http://www.penguin.co.uk/static/cs/uk/0/minisites/penguindesignaward/pda2012_lscobie.php )
This is a very prestigious award in the design industry, and it is open to students on any art & design course.  For this I won £350.

 The wolf is a recurring and prominent character within the tales of the Brothers Grimm, and so he became the focus of my cover. I wanted the wolf to interact with the book and so he is wrapped around it, grasping the cover with his claws, tempting children to read it if they dare.

I used woodcut to create my design, harking back to traditional methods of book illustration, and also referencing the iconic setting of many of Grimm’s Fairy Tales – the deep dark woods . . .

After hearing that I was shortlisted, and receiving feedback from Anna Billson, art director of Penguin Children’s, I enhanced my woodcut design by taking it through further print process. I used the facilities at uni to screenprint the cover in fluorescent red, and then embossed the wolf so he literally jumps out from the cover. Anna made a point of telling me that it was these processes that made me do well!

Left on the shelf, unwanted and abandoned – two graphic design students from London’s Kingston University are helping homeless hounds at Battersea Dogs Home through a novel exhibition featuring rejected works of art.

 The exhibition, entitled Thanks But No Thanks, came about after Alex Brown and Ben West submitted a poster design for a competition. Although the pair were unsuccessful with their entry, it was this outcome that got the design duo thinking.

 “I was really pleased with the poster design we’d put together so had already decided that we would have it printed anyway,” Ben said. “It prompted us to think about the creative industry as a whole and how many artists and designers must have had similar experiences to us with their work perhaps being turned down or discarded when the designs weren’t quite right for the intended brief.”

 Handwriting more than 200 letters to graphic designers, the two students set about rounding up unwanted, unused and unfinished projects in the form of prints, paintings and posters. “It took a while to get all the pieces together,” Alex, 24, from Eastbourne, said. “We persevered though following up our letters with emails and phone calls and eventually the donations started coming in.”

 Once the artwork was in, Alex and Ben set up the exhibition at the Beach Gallery, London where it ran from June 1 – 6. Artwork on display ranged from a rejected poster for the 2014 Winter Olympics by Wally Olins to a hand lotion bottle by graphic design studio BOB Design that Space NK didn’t want. There was even something for music lovers in the form of an abandoned Bob Dylan portrait by graphic designer Ian Wright.

The show culminated in the donated designs being sold with the money going to Battersea Dogs Home. “The intention was always for the project to raise money for charity,” 23 year old Ben from Braunton in Devon, explained. “Donating the proceeds to Battersea Dogs Home made perfect sense as the artwork – just like the animals at the centre – had all been abandoned and rejected.”

The auctioned artwork raised a grand total of £700 for the pet charity. Bids ranging from £5 to £50 were placed for the individual pieces, with an unused illustration designed for Girl Talk magazine, donated by artist Rob Ryan, fetching the top price of £75. “There was no way of knowing how much money each piece was going to make,” Ben explained. “At the end of the day, it was all down to what people liked. Although Rob Ryan’s illustration wasn’t right for Girl Talk magazine, someone else loved it and just had to have it.”

Similarly, Alex was so taken with a piece donated by designer Marion Deuchars that he bought it himself. “I think one of the reasons I like it so much is because it’s hand drawn,” he said. “We were keen to receive items that showed the process and not just the finished, polished pieces.”

 More of Alex and Ben’s work will be on display at:

Take Shape
End of Year Show
5-9th July 2012
Dray Walk Gallery
The Old Truman Brewery
91 Brick Lane
London
E1 6QL

Two first year graphic design and photography students, Luke Evans and Josh Lake have been interviewed by Channel 4 news following their fascinating project called ’Inside Out’.  The students swallowed 35mm film to see the effect their digestive systems would have on it. The pair swallowed the individual frames of rolled up film in the dark in special canisters they had designed themselves. The canister had holes in it which allowed all the fluids, acids and enzymes in their stomachs to penetrate it and have their full effect on the film. The film was collected  in a dark room and then scanned using an electron microscope to see the damage their digestive systems had done to the surface of the film.

The resulting prints were exhibited at the Hoxton Gallery in London.

Over-worked. Misunderstood. Mocked by intellectuals. Such is the plight of the once-proud exclamation mark. Now a student at London’s Kingston University has come to the rescue of this much-maligned piece of punctuation, designing 12 new siblings to share its workload.

“The exclamation mark has become over used – and often comes across as crass,” 22 year old Benji Roebuck, from Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, said. “Part of the problem is that we’re asking one piece of punctuation to do too many jobs. So I’ve created a depression mark, a jealousy mark and even an excitement mark.”

Benji, who is studying graphic design at Kingston, got in touch with David Crystal, Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor – the author of more than 100 books about the English language and a regular contributor to television and radio programmes – asking him to set a brief.

“Most students go to designers for that type of thing but I wanted to do something a bit different,” Benji said. “I was surprised and really pleased when Professor Crystal replied suggesting I work on the exclamation mark. For a long time I didn’t know what to do, but found myself thinking about it more and more and realised I wasn’t going to be able to get it out of my head unless I did something about it.”

Some of the new range of exclamation marks are self-explanatory – anxiety is a squiggly line, while hope is indicated by an upwards arrow. Others are more oblique – a small question mark represents curiosity and a swollen exclamation mark conveys pride.

The results are currently on display at Kingston University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture’s undergraduate degree show, which runs until June 22 at the Knights Park campus. They sit alongside final-year projects from a variety of disciplines including fashion, film-making, fine art, landscape architecture and product and furniture design.

Benji hopes show-goers will find his project thought provoking. “These exclamation marks would enable people to change the meaning of a sentence without altering any of the words,” he explained. Visitors to the exhibition will even be able to put the exclamation marks to the test and, using an ink pad provided, stamp it on to a sentence of their choice. “By applying a different exclamation mark they will be able to change the sense of what precedes it by indicating that the speaker is jealous, angry or confused,” he explained.

Benji has sent his finished designs to Professor Crystal, who has been impressed with the outcome. “Benji has produced a clever and innovative project, which makes one appreciate the limitations as well as the expressive potential of the punctuation system,” he said.

Kingston’s academic director of communication design, Rebecca Wright, said Benji had been fascinated by language and its importance to graphic designers during the course of his degree studies. “Benji is interested in the words, not just how they’re presented. In this project he’s had a great deal of fun experimenting with a punctuation mark – and visitors to the show will be able to share that enjoyment,” she added.