For Hilda Kortei, the biggest challenge of the Pantone brief was finding out what colour really means to her home town of Croydon
Course: BA (Hons) Graphic Design
Project: Colourful Accents
Pantone's D&AD New Blood brief this year was to reimagine your home town in a new colour scheme. Hilda Kortei rose to the challenge, with Croydon as her canvas.
"Croydon is bold. Croydon is colourful. It's a town filled with people from all over the world, therefore everyone has their own unique accent," she declares.
Kortei set out to find a palette that was expressive of Croydon: “It was about taking from the people, and giving it back to them,” she adds
"My aim was to create a colourful identity generated from the people of Croydon themselves, focusing predominantly on accents and the pronunciation of words," she continues. "I created four Croydon Council logos, alternating between the seven favourite colours of the people of Croydon."
Thomas Weeden produced a whole series of looping GIFs as part of his animated comic project
Course: BA (Hons) Illustration
Project: Animated GIF comics
For his final-year brief, Thomas Weeden set out to combine comics ("a branch of illustration I have struggled with") with animation ("something I've recently found great interest and enjoyment in") to create an animated comic hybrid.
"I most commonly start with the silhouette of a character, a large brightly coloured blob that is gradually cut down and moulded into more familiar shapes," he reveals.
"Once recognisable I may embellish the subject with small props and noisy textures, but I always try my best to keep it colourful and easy to understand."
For Weeden, the most satisfying part of a looping GIF lies in making the finishing touches to that last frame and seeing the whole thing come together “in one fluid motion”
His greatest hurdles were technical, but he relished the challenge and learnt many lessons along the way – including the value of batch-rendering individual frames as jpegs, rather than attempting to animate hundreds of separate elements in After Effects.
Sam Pittman's Change of State project tested the limitations of different materials, including paper
Course: BA (Hons) Graphic Design
Project: Change of State
Sam Pittman's final project began as an investigation into the theme of 'limitations': "I wanted to address what they are, where and why do they exist? And how can we overcome them?" he explains.
In the early stages of the process, Pittman decided to test his mental and creative limitations by tackling as many design briefs as he could within one continuous 24-hour period: "20 being the result," he grins.
Constructing the cutting pattern was a challenge: “It had to consider the model’s shape and fit to the contours of her body,” says Pittman
After exploring various tangents, Pittman's project really came together when he set himself the challenge of expanding a sheet of A4 paper to A3 size.
"The project culminated in an exploration of material limitations, with a particular interest in how the application of certain processes can adapt the characteristics of a humble material."
Nathan Cowdry's Western Voyeur has a sharp satirical edge
Course: BA (Hons) Illustration
Project: Western Voyeur comics
Long fascinated with the 'underground' comic strip format, Nathan Cowdry set out to produce a full book of illustrations that are deliberately "rough around the edges" rather than slick and glossy.
"My drawing process is needlessly meticulous," he admits. "I draw a rough pencil draft, photocopy at a different scale for composition purposes, re-draw in pencil using a light box, draw final lines in ink, clear up mistakes with a white correction pen, photocopy again, scan the photocopy to computer, colour using Photoshop, then print."
Before this project, all of Cowdry's work was black-and-white, created using a deliberately meticulous analogue process
Before Western Voyeur, almost all of Cowdry's work has a black-and-white 'punk poster' aesthetic, so adding colour digitally was a new process for him.
"My unwillingness to use computers had become a half-hearted attempt at keeping a 'traditional' element in my work, but ended up restricting my practice," he adds.
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