D&AD Blog

New Blood: Graduate festival moves to east London

New Blood will be undergoing radical transformation and moving to Shoreditch in east London next summer.

2009 New Blood Exhibition at Olympia. Photo Credit: Christine Donnier-Valentin

The exhibition element will take up one week of graduate show Free Range from 24-29 June. We'll fill the Truman Brewery with the best advertising and design courses from our University Network membership.  The exhibition will be complemented by a range of events and activities arranged in partnership with creative organisations and companies in the area.

 

Laura Woodroffe, Director of Education & Professional Development says “New Blood will centre around networking – a crucial skill for students to learn. Where better to learn that than in the middle of one of London’s creative hubs?  We’re going to take over Shoreditch and are calling on all our industry friends in the area to work with us to participate in creative ways.  We will run a series of industry events, along with workshops and training for students and tutors.  Additional content will be provided by our education partners Shellsuitzombie, who will run activities within the exhibition itself.”

Tamsin O'Hanlon, Free Range Director said “Free Range and D&AD New Blood are quite simply stronger by working together. Through this partnership we will be better able to support tomorrows' creative talent and their tutors.”

Chris Waite, the Course Leader at University College Falmouth says “New Blood has always been a motivating and inspiring occasion for our Graphic Design, Illustration and Advertising students."

"It’s a great opportunity for them to show off their talents to a genuinely influential audience.  The move of venue to Shoreditch – smack in the middle of London’s communications industry – promises not only a great show, but also a whole series of satellite workshop and training events, to be run in collaboration with the kind of organisations where our graduates aspire to work.  The potential for networking – students, employers, tutors, media – is without equal.  We’re looking forward to it immensely.”

“This is a prime opportunity for the industry,’ said Greg Quinton, D&AD Education Chairman and Creative Partner at The Partners.  “Not only will it be incredibly convenient for many to be able to simply drop in to the exhibition, the savvy within the industry should also be getting in touch with D&AD to organise events that get those graduates into their agencies and studios.  Agencies and graduates both learn so much about ’agency fit’ by simply sharing a bit of time in their own space/habitat/turf/caravan/etc.”  

We are - ShellsuitZombie - your friends.

Give a design grad a job and he'll be employed for two years. Give him the means to get one himself and he'll be moderately wealthy with a detached home in SE18 by the time he's forty - Ancient Proverb

Hi readers, we're ShellsuitZombie, a small graduate organisation whose aim is to cut through the crap and help you get yourself into the creative industry. Since we graduated just over a year ago we've collectively been hired eight times, lost two jobs, worked in London and Paris, freelanced for some great and awful people and for some and no money, lived in A LOT of different houses, bought six bicycles and baked a cake. Using this experience (mainly the baking) we set up SSZ to encourage both graduates and the creative industry to fall in love again.

We try to do this in three ways.

1. Forget 'Mother', think brothers.

Through our website we put graduates and their work on a level playing field with the work that inspires them. After all, what x Art-Director did with £12 million shoot is of limited relevance to a poor student whose budget is second hand baked beans tins. At our stage you can't just throw money at stuff, the idea has to be good, and a lot of yours beat the pros hands down.

2. Let's get boozed

Don't take that title too literally, but booze (and socials in general) work wonders for smashing some of the employer-employee (or industry-graduate) barriers that might taint more formal events (dare I say, such as New Blood). When the whiff of desperation has passed, we can all have a larf. Our events try to make that happen. In addition graduates sharing advice and stories with each other is invaluable - A room full of them can only be a good thing.

3. REVOLUTION

We proudly (and angrily at times) act as a voice against those who would have everyone believe there isn't a hope for graduates, the nay-sayers who sit on their thrones and spout condescending and patronising garble about the number of grads per job, the state of education and the inevitability of our collective fate in Broken Britain. We really hate those guys.

So there you have it. We are all working graduate creatives from backgrounds in design and advertising who have a passion for making this whole process easier, less stressful and most importantly more fun for you guys. No-one chooses a creative career as a fallback, it's a way of life. We've had tough times over the last 18 months but there isn't one of us who would swap them for a management recruitment salary and an easy time. Sod that, we make shit look good.

ShellSuitZombie at D&AD New Blood 2009

Please come and visit us at www.shellsuitzombie.co.uk where you can sign up to our mailing list to find out about future events/competitions, submit your work, subscribe to our RSS feed and have a closer look at what we do. We also like twitter (@shellsuitzombie) very much, so hit us up on that bad boy.

Peace, Love and Cakes Galore

Jonny Burch

ShellsuitZombie

TALK TALK – A postscript to the Thoughtful Six Project

Last year D&AD showcased four inspirational education projects at our Student Awards. They looked at new ways of working and profiled examples of great collaboration between industry and education. You can watch the first film about the Thoughtful Six here.

Six months on, we asked them to talk about their experiences. One of the lead tutors and D&AD University Network member James Corazzo from Stockport College talks about it:

The Thoughtful Six Project, in simple terms, turned the idea of the work placement on its head – rather than the students trying to find a work placement in lots of different design agencies, Thoughtful design agency did a placement in Stockport College.

The genesis of the project came from thinking about how little design educators and design professionals actually talk to each other and how when we do, we often fail to get beyond the same old clichés and finger pointing. This has to change. The design industry desperately needs a better understanding of design education and design education desperately needs a better understanding of the design industry.

We can’t claim to have nailed the whole understanding thing but by moving a design agency into the department it created an opportunity to start a dialogue. Whether it was while passing in a corridor or towards the end of the day, we had lots of conversations that ranged, as good ones do, all over the place - but they always came back to the students, design, and design education. However, unlike many discussions I have experienced with design professionals never once did a sentence begin “you should be doing this…”.

Perhaps, because we had the time and the opportunity to get to understand the complexities of each other’s situations we started to recognise the similarities, not the differences; we are all in the business of dealing with, or helping people deal with, an increasingly complex and uncertain world.

If I had to summarise what the six students that worked with Thoughtful got from the project – a fine looking portfolio, a CV enhancing placement, knowing how to talk to people, a good story and a network of contacts aside – ultimately it was the sustained insight into dealing and coping with uncertainty.

Having Thoughtful live and work in the college for the last 12 months has also had an enormous impact beyond the six students and not in the ways we might have anticipated. The dialogue has provoked us to reconfigure what we do, perhaps surprisingly, we are moving away from explicitly industry focused projects towards broader approaches that focus on cultivating individuals whose creative thinking is only one aspect alongside resourcefulness and resilience. It has also prompted the idea of developing a more agile and responsive curriculum – a challenge within an institutional framework.  

And its not just been one way, Thoughtful have changed too; “we can see how tutors are able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers in the trenches as well view the battle from the top of the hill. This gives good tutors a unique and expansive view of the world and how design and their students fit into that world.”

We’re involved with the University Network because we think it’s uniquely placed to enable and encourage institutions to find innovative ways to configure, extend and deepen their relationships with design professionals, not because we should be mirroring industry, but because good dialogue will create a richer ecology. D&AD can move the debate on by creating constructive forums and opportunities to draw insightful industry voices into a sustained collaboration with educators.

But it's not just design educators and design professionals that should be yakking more, it needs to happen between institutions, more sharing, more talking. Bring on the real network.

Thoughtful are an ideas agency for the 21st century whose clients include Tate, British Council, howies, innocent and Royal Mail. James Corazzo is a Lecturer on the BA(Hons) Graphic Design course at Stockport College. If you would like to know more about the project James would be very happy to hear from you. Please comment or ask questions below.

Everyone starts somewhere

Piccadilly Circus, by 2nd year student, Richard Seymour

Throughout his year as D&AD President, Garrick's underlying theme has been that 'Everyone starts somewhere'. He has hosted the odd pub event where leading creative lights have shown their early work and has asked his President's Lecturers to include a student piece or two into their talks.

We've now brought all of this and more together into an 'Everyone starts somewhere' exhibition. If you're at New Blood this week, you'll be able to see the exhibition up on the balcony. If you can't make it, we've also put an online gallery together, with all the pics up on Flickr.