get it off your chest…

We are soon going to run a taster project to give people in Yr10 or Yr11 an opportunity to work with us on a design brief. The taster project will take place in three sessions running on Saturdays over a six week period in April and May. The brief will be to take a social issue that you are passionate about, and to visualise your thoughts and feelings by creating a challenging and exciting design for a t-shirt.

This is a fantastic opportunity to come and have a go at Graphic Design, so if you are reading this and you're in Yr10 or Yr11, or have any younger brothers, sisters, cousins, or friends who might be interested, then please get in touch with us and sign them up! All the details are on the poster above…

We are looking forward to meeting and working with some fresh, new, design faces!

logo love…

Our first years are currently working on a live brief. They have been asked to create a logo design for the Red Rosettes Choir from Burnley. The choir is an all ladies, all ages group which has members as old as 8, and as young as 80! Our first years have all pitched initial logo ideas to Chris and Hannah from Burnley council, who visited us recently to discuss the designs, providing feedback and mentioning some of the ideas that they liked.
The clients are coming back into college on the 17th April to view a final logo from each of our first year students, hopefully to pick a winning design!
Good luck to all our first years :)

perfect pages…

To promote our shiny new UAL Extended Diploma Graphic Design course to prospective students, Tim has been working away on a new course portfolio. He is keeping it very close to his chest, but has been working away at collecting together examples of student work from the past couple of years that helps best communicate the skills and projects covered over the new two year course.
We will have some pages up to view soon, stay tuned…

highly animated…

Right about now our first years should be busy working on the final stages of their time-based media project. So far they have created a photographic timeline/story, as well as illustrating lots and lots of frames to make an expressive type flick-book. Now they are focusing on producing an animated GIF to present an on-screen version of their expressive type…
While we wait for them to meet their deadline for the project, we thought we would share this fantastic example of a typographic GIF. This is part of a series of typographic GIFs created by MountStar, entitled Hidden Typography. You can see both parts of the GIF series, as well as other examples of MountStar work here

Deadline on Thursday guys. Get cracking…

apples and pears…

Recently most of the EDGD team went out on the road… taking a course trip to London. We all had a great time, visiting the Tate Modern and Saatchi galleries as well as acting like tourists and going on the London Eye, and a Thames boat cruise. Some members of the group also went to the Barbican Centre to experience The Rain Room, while other members of the group went up The Shard, Graffiti spotting at Leake Street Tunnel, Vinyl shopping in Soho, as well as seeing Camden, Covent Garden, Leicester Square and China-Town. Luckily after all that excitement we had half-term to recover!

There was quite a few photos snapped, which will work their way onto our Facebook soon, as well as a couple of other stories we might share on here too! Remember, we're always watching…

blast from the past…

Just before February half-term, we had a visiting lecture here at EDGD from ex-student Rebecca Morris. Rebecca graduated from our very own Extended Diploma Graphic Design course way back in 2009, and we wanted someone to talk to our current students about the challenges and experiences they may face after completing our course. Post EDGD, Rebecca went on to start a degree course at UCLAN in Preston, but eventually transferred back to Blackburn to complete her BA studies here at the college University Centre. 
After graduating from her degree course, Rebecca did a couple of work placements in design studios before landing a job at Source Creative, based here in Blackburn. This has obviously made her very happy, and it was great to her Rebecca talk about her experiences as a student here at Blackburn College, the challenges faced when studying at university level, as well as the drive and motivation that is needed to become an employed and exciting graphic designer! She brought along her college portfolio and examples of her current graphic design work. 
We here at EDGD want to say a great big thank-you to Rebecca for coming back and paying us a visit :)

back in black(burn)…

We are back on our blog, after what seems like forever!! We are all still here, and all still working hard… We are in somewhat of a transitional period here at EDGD, which has been one of the reasons for the lack of updates. The course is changing… again! We are still an Extended Diploma, and we will remain as a Graphic Design course, however now our qualification is accredited by UAL (University of the Arts London) rather than being a BTEC/Edexcel course. 
Our current second years will be the last students to complete the BTEC version of our qualification, while our current first years are studying the new UAL version, and in September we will be completely running both years as UAL students! Exciting times…
Some things change, but don't worry - some things still say the same. We will explain the changes in more detail in future blog posts, but we will continue doing fun, exciting projects as always… plus, there is still going to be an FMP, and an exhibition :)

You will be hearing from us again soon. And remember, we're still always watching…