After the success of last year’s project, the Schools Team ran Graphic Gathering for the second year, launching it during the London Design Festival and culminating with a celebratory awards ceremony here at the V&A last Thursday. Runners-up, winners from each school and overall winners were announced.
Graphic Gathering aims to give secondary students an insight into design at Higher Education and Industry level by answering a real life brief set by the V&A & D&AD. D&AD is the perfect partner for the V&A Schools team for this project. Its aims to inform, educate and inspire those who work within the creative industries complementing the V&A Schools Team objectives, to open up career pathways into creative careers. D&AD’s annual awards are recognised throughout the world. They set the absolute reference standard for creative excellence.
School students who took part in Graphic Gathering were given a brief that was set originally for the D&AD New Blood Awards and is linked to the V&A FuturePlan. As part of FuturePlan the V&A is embarking upon a major development project to create new galleries and public spaces accessed through an entrance on Exhibition Road.
Work will begin on the redevelopment this year and will open to the public in 2016. While the work is being undertaken, a hoarding will be erected around the site to shield the building works and inspire the public. The brief asks students to ‘Design or illustrate a hoarding for the V&A’s Exhibition Road redevelopment’.
At the launch event for teachers during the London Design Festival, we worked with D&AD and invited designers to tackle the brief and think about different ways to approach it, giving teachers the tools they needed to deliver the brief back in School. The students then had around 3 months to work on the brief and returned last week to present their responses to a panel of industry judges and other participating schools.
The panel was made up of the New Blood Awards winnner for this brief, Chris Algar who also works as a designer at Design Bridge, Fred Deakin, Creative and Graphic Communication tutor at University of the Arts London, Kati Russell who heads up New Blood at D&AD and Cara Williams, V&A Schools Programme Manager. There were five participating schools in this year’s project and the panel also selected two overall winners, Terry Murray and Parris Gachette who were both awarded prizes. These students were selected both for their winning concepts and the high level of execution they had put into their final presentations. Teacher Nicola Mansell from The Bedford Sixth Form School commented ‘It was a great chance for the learners to share their work and gain valuable insight into others outcomes’.
The standard of work was excellent and the day allowed for lots of discussion between teachers and students about next steps into education and work. Chris presented his winning work and spoke to the students about his own journey tackling the brief. Fred Deakin and Kati Russell talked about career pathways, developing portfolios and the value of internships which was all really useful. Nicola Mansell says ‘The advice given to learners about pathways to take after A Levels was great. I have a large number of students in my class who want to study Graphics within further education, so this discussion was extremely helpful to them.’
The winning entries can all be seen below. The Schools team will be running a new brief for Graphic Gathering 2014/15. To find out or more or register your interest please get in touch at schools@vam.ac.uk.
Brentside High School
Winning work – Jeff To
The Bedford Sixth Form School
Winning work – Georgia Murray
Rains Foundation School
Winning work – Terrance Murray
St Aloysius RC School
Winning Work – Parris Gachette
Anthony Yannit
Northbrook College
Winning work – Kit and Romy
