Through the society I am in touch with the Jonny at Shellsuit Zombie on a regular basis. One of the opportunities this gave me was to write an article for their new magazine.
Teaming up with Jess Walker and Mario Picariello, we wrote and art directed an article based around the numerous extremities we go to in the name of design.
If you would like to view or buy a copy of the magazine please visit the Shellsuit Zombie website.
Whilst at New Blood I signed Plymouth University up to Shellsuit Zombie's creative 'Face-Off'. These were a series of design challenges between different 8 universities where the finalists would win placement opportunities at 'Dave'.
Our first 'battle' was against Falmouth where both teams had to pick a service and celebrity out of a hat. The challenge was in effectively advertising 'Apple', our service, with 'Bono' our celebrity. We won.
The final round was between four universities. The brief was to come up with an advertising campaign for the merger between Orange and T-Mobile. Whilst we may have had the best presentation and thought out campaign (or so we were told) Bolton University came up with a simple and effective tagline, winning them the battle.
Thank you to Shellsuit Zombie for the opportunity and being amazingly cool people and to the Plymouth University team (Catkin Pritchard, Kate Moby, Mario Picariello, Ralph Mannings, Richard Gray and Xander Lee)
Forget Guns and Roses 'Welcome to the Jungle', I think the official D&AD New Blood song should be 'Welcome to the Greenhouse!' Hopefully not putting off too many creatives but it did get pretty hot up there!
After attending for several years, it was great to finally exhibit at New Blood and fantastic to discuss design and the portfolio in a relaxed and friendly environment with many new contacts and friends made. There is a lot of inspiring work to be seen and another benefit was seeing what other, similar minded students had been up to over the year.
Another positive side was the number of talks and events taking place such as the COG's portfolio sessions, Design Bridge's 'how to be a junior designer' and Patrick's top tips talk at Navyblue.
D&AD is something I would recommend to all, both students and industry, as a great place to meet, network and see the most creative and freshest ideas out there!
