Pure Joy

HND Graphic Design student Joy Mooney took the Breakthrough Award at the DMA awards recently in London. The DMA Breakthrough Awards runs in partnership with the DMA Awards and GRT.



This year, Direct Line supplied the brief, which was to re-position Direct Line to a younger target audience for new car insurance by building awareness of the brand and increasing understanding of 'black box' insurance. We managed to produce all three finalists with Joy being joined by Natasha Ryan and Blanca Jiminez.

All three travelled down to London with tutor Helena Good to pitch their ideas to the judging panel, ahead of attending the Awards.  Joy took the top prize but Natasha and Blanca shared the joint Silver prize - a huge achievement all round for our student creatives.

Another Big Star

Niamh picks up her award from Union's Creative Director Sheryl Thompson (right) and host Danni Menzies.

To round off a bumper year, the course is celebrating another win at the Marketing Society Scotland Star Awards, with HND student Niamh Curran picking up Star Creative Student accolade for her work on the STV brief, sponsored by the Union.

This project is unique on the course because the initial response is a written submission, and the shortlisted candidates then pitch their developed idea to the judging panel. Niamh held off competition from talented creative students at Robert Gordon's and DJCAD, and our students have now won this award in no less than six times in the last seven years.

An extra bonus this year was that 2017 graduate Christina Giannakou, now a designer at AlwaysBeContent, was shortlisted in the Rising Creative Star category, a great achievement so early in her career.

Now in its fourteenth year, the Star Awards brings together the largest gathering of the marketing and advertising community outside of London.  This year, some 500 practitioners, clients and creatives celebrated at the Corn Exchange in Edinburgh.  The full list of winners can be found here.

Samples from Niamh's submission -

Star Creative Shortlist 2018

We're celebrating good news from the Marketing Society Scotland, who have announced their annual shortlist of six students for the Star Creative Award 2018. Our HND final year student Niamh Curran has made the shortlist, alongside students from Robert Gordon's, DJCAD and Dundee University.

The award is in the Development category, sponsored by Union Direct, and requires students from Universities and Colleges in Scotland to submit a written proposal to a brief set by a high-profile client.  This year, the client was STV Creative, and the brief was to devise a campaign to expand STV's reach with younger audiences across Scotland.

The shortlisted students will all pitch their developed ideas to the judging panel at the Union Agency, and the winner will be announced at the Marketing Society Star Awards, the annual celebration of Scotland's world-class marketing community, in June at the Corn Exchange in Edinburgh.  You can find out more about the awards, including the shortlists across all the professional categories, at the Star Awards 2018 website.

Over the course of the last few years our course has produced five winners of this award, including the winning student in each of the past four years.

Sprint Friday in Berlin

Traditionally as part of our annual Berlin study trip in February we arrange a studio visit. In past years this has included the generosity of Saatchi, TLGG and Eden Spiekermann. This year we were lucky enough to visit Axel Springer, one of the world's largest publishers, on the Wednesday (which we'll report on in a separate post) and AJ&Smart, one of the foremost exponents of the 'Design Sprint' ethos in modern visual communication, on the Friday.

The AJ&Smart studio is located in East Berlin, close to the East Side Gallery (one of the few intact parts of the Berlin Wall). The studio was founded by Aussie Michael Smart and Irishman Jonathan Courtney, and includes employees from the UK, Finland, Brazil, Russia, Poland, and of course Germany.  We were lucky enough to meet Michael when our group - all 40 students - arrived just before 4pm on Friday.



Huge glyphs on a wall right opposite the AJ&Smart office on Kopernicker Strasse.


Our students are all set to hear from the lovely folks at AJ&Smart

Venla Hakunti and Rob Hamblen, both wearing some cosy-looking AJ&Smart slippers, put together a great welcome and a fantastic presentation to the students.  The presentation focussed on the company's 4-day sprint process, itself based on the original 5-day model devised by Jake Knapp, a design partner at Google Ventures and the author of the best-selling book 'Sprint'.

Rob introduced some of AJ&Smart's clients - who have included Air BNB, Slack, and Europe's biggest retailer MOVMNT - and talked about their approach to design thinking and how the studio selects and manages its projects.  He then explained the typical sprint process at AJ&Smart - ideation, sketching/storyboarding, prototyping and testing - then demo'd some awesome sprint products, including a really cool mobile app for Red Bull and a (prototype) real bar of chocolate.


Something AJ&Smart build up plenty of during a Design Sprint


Rob explaining the four day sprint model.

As well as reeling off too many great quotes to list here, Rob, himself an HND graduate in Graphic Design, then gave a great Q&A, and our students asked some really sharp questions about generating ideas, dealing with clients, planning, timescales and process.

The AJ&Smart experience also included some nice refreshments and a general natter at the very end, and all of our students were clearly buzzing after the talk. It's always amazing when busy organisations take the time to host talks to students, and everyone agreed this was a big highlight of the 2018 Berlin trip.  Massive thanks to Venla, Rob and also to Danny Holtschke for making this all happen.  Hopefully we will visit again next year!


We left AJ&Smart a heartfelt message.


They even do Design Sprints in the AJ&Smart toilet!