computer parts

Long gone is the era when a branding project involved the agency receiving the brief, traipsing off to the studio to design in isolation, and then handing over a perfectly formed piece of branding to a satisfied client.

It is clear to any agency worth its salt, that design work – and branding design in particular – requires a more collaborative approach these days.

"Without a collaborative relationship, based on mutual trust and respect, clients are only ever going to get a studio's interpretation of their brand, rather than communication that has been informed by essential dialogue from within a client organisation," says Simon Elliott, partner at design studio Rose, which won Best of Show at last year's Computer Arts Brand Impact Awards.

The nature of branding work itself means that a collaborative approach to design is a must. Branding projects tend to support or convey organisational change within a business, says Jon Hewitt, creative director at Moving Brands, winner of a Brand Impact Award in the Entertainment category.

"People within the business that you're working with need to feel that their voice is being heard. So branding projects tend to have lots of inputs from lots of different people, and the nature of it means that you have to find ways to get people involved. Share regularly, and listen to their point of view."

Branding design is not about creating a brand in isolation and then handing it over, agrees Karen Hughes, creative director at True North, winner of a Brand Impact Award in the Culture category: "It's about co-creating something that people can get behind and champion."

Having the input of the people who live and breathe the brand on a day-to-day basis, will ensure brand design that is meaningful, inspiring and practical for those with the responsibility to deliver it.

Branding design today also means that if done correctly, it should make the senior management think about all aspects of their business and how it can be improved.

"If you have a good relationship," says Gareth Howat, founding partner at triple Brand Impact Award winner hat-trick. "This can be a really powerful tool for the organisation for change. It's not always straightforward, so you need to work closely together as you go along."

Design consultancy johnson banks also picked up three Brand Impact Awards in 2014, and often works closely with clients' in-house design studios. In fact, many clients have bigger design studios than the johnson banks outfit itself, founder Michael Johnson points out.

"We learned a long time ago that setting up a good dialogue between us and the in-house teams is fantastically useful. They have a plethora of insights and knowledge that we could take months, if not years, to fully understand." The scale of some of the branding work also demands that the work be shared, he adds.

"And crucially, a good brand idea stands and falls on its implementation, and that is where in-house teams really come into their own. If they like it, have been involved, feel part of the process, then things just run a lot more smoothly."

A recent client, The Cystic Fibrosis Trust, for example, took the brand idea and toolkit and really ran with it, says Johnson. "All very encouraging."

But the actual process of forming successful collaborative relationships between design studio and client is complex. Collaboration can work on various levels, and establishing the optimal balance can be tricky. There should be some degree of collaboration on any project, but the extent of this depends on the culture of the organisation, Hughes observes.

For example, True North works extensively with the Wellcome Trust, where collaboration is a value that runs through everything. "For an organisation like this, consultation and co-creation is the only approach that we would ever consider taking," reveals Hughes.

"Collaboration is particularly important when working with an organisation with a large amount of stakeholders and decision makers, which these days is becoming more and more the norm."

Moving Brands also works extremely collaboratively with a number of its clients and their in-house teams. One such client is the BBC's User Experience and Design team. "We physically mix up the Moving Brands and BBC design team so that we're all in one space," says Hewitt.

And this approach has worked well: "It helps to run the decision-making process," he explains. "Sometimes it takes as long preparing a presentation on a piece of work as actually doing the work, so [the collaboration] strips that away and makes the whole process a lot more efficient."

Meanwhile, at johnson banks, client input into writing a brand's narrative is key, and the strategic stages of a project always involve multiple workshops. "The next stage, the design stage, we often do on our own, although we have sometimes worked in parallel with client teams," adds Johnson.

"We find the best way to collaborate is once an overall route is agreed, and then we can jointly work out how to best implement it. That often involves client teams coming to us 'on placement' to get under the skin of an idea and help us work out the best way to roll it out."

During johnson banks' work with the Science Museum, for example, members of the in-house team took it in turns to come to the studio and spend time there working on live projects. This "helped them get into the design idea", says Johnson, "and also helped us understand the requirements of certain 'tricky' clients at the museum."

However, while some clients really want to be completely hands-on at all stages of the design process, others might prefer to keep agencies at arm's distance, Howat points out. "You ideally need something in between, so you can get involvement from the client, but you maintain some perspective on the project."

...

Let's start out by saying this is not something you can do all the time, every day for the rest of your life. With that said, you can do it more often than you do today, and you can definitely choose to say 'Yes' in every situation that demands it, to make your life funnier, better and more fulfilling. After all, life is all about creating stories that you can live in, remember with a smile and re-tell with a smirk.

People on their deathbed regret that they didn't do everything they wanted to do in their life, that they spent their time playing it too safe. At Snask, we live by the motto of always saying 'Yes' instead of 'No'. It has taken us across the globe, and we've met insane and genius people everywhere we went.

The hardest moments are when you're tired and feel like you don't have the energy to say 'Yes'. That's when you need to say it and get off your ass. You'll always be rewarded, no matter if it's a friend wanting beer company or a new project idea from a colleague.

We've been doing our own club nights, our own bicycle, written our own book, made our own track-and-field event, organised our own creative conference, started a record label, and now we're currently working on our own beer brand, our own chocolate brand and opening our own bar.

There's a reason why improvisational theatre has the rule that no one is allowed to say 'No'. Simply because it destroys the flow, limits opportunities and makes the story more predictable. Start living your life saying 'No' less and 'Yes' more, and you'll see for yourself what the fuck we're on about here. Because it's not all about business – saying 'Yes' in private life is equally important.

In the earliest days of Snask I gave Magnus an iPod engraved with the very title of this column. It nagged him for weeks until he quit his job and started Snask with me. Why? Because deep down he knew it was true and had to follow it.

Out of 100 people you contact, you get 10 replies; one of them wants to hear more. Out of 10 self-initiated projects we start up we actually finish one, but do it to 110 per cent. Saying 'Yes' opens doors for things you can do and people to meet, hang out with, and even fall in love with.

Sometimes saying 'Yes' can get you into awkward and/or strange situations. Once we got oiled and naked and shot lasers from our chests in an MTV ad to promote our DJ gig in the Balkan region, which had 160 million viewers.

But these situations are often the beginning of a fabulous story worthy of telling your grandchildren, when you can still remember them.

Snask

We know it isn't always easy being a new graduate. So to celebrate 2015 degree show season, get an incredible 50 per cent off an annual subscription to Computer Arts magazine. For just £39 you'll receive an entire year of industry insight, opinion and inspiration, delivered to your door.

Plus: sign up by 7 July 2015 and you'll receive Computer Arts' New Talent issue, featuring an extensive guide to 2015's most outstanding design graduates – and a very special cover designed in response to a joint brief with D&AD New Blood (have you taken part?)...

In the opening talk of the last day of TYPO Berlin, Aaron James Draplin shared some ‘tall tales from a large man,’ covering the importance of saying yes more than no, and how working for friends led him to designing for the president.

The man behind Draplin Design Co. might have been jet-lagged, but this larger than life character showed no sign of flagging as he bolted through 130-odd slides, covering recent logo work, favourite Bauhaus archive material, and several photos of his sausage dog Gary.

The core of Aaron's philosophy is work for the right people for the right reasons, and you'll flourish, something he's been living by since he designed his friend's logo for a hot dog pop up stand. This was before he washed dishes for four summers to get money for a computer, he says, and after going freelance in 2004.

"I found a way to work with my friends. It got better every year. There was not much money, but then freelance brought in some, and how much money do we need?"

The point is made as Aaron put up the Cobra Dogs logo against his Air Max 360 logo, which he did for Nike. "Nike wanted everything yesterday. There’s loads of work, then it explodes everywhere, and then it disappears – too weird,” he explains.

Ultimately, he got more work from helping others than taking the big company dollar. "Not everything is about cash and making money. We forget that we can make our own things."

A case in point is Aaron's Field Notes series of memo notes. Inspired by the notebooks of the 1920s, they're now sold in 1,000 plus stores in the US. "I think compromise is a big deal in design, so I'd reduce [my fee] with a client. But with Field Notes, every dollar we get back is ours."

Of course, Aaron isn't suggesting designers should say yes to every client, pointing out that, "We have something valuable – clients need something from you."

The point is to be OK with letting your passions push you. With president Obama's inauguration, his new logo caught Aaron's eye. He got obsessed with it, collected images of it on cakes and as tattoos. Then the White House called, and Aaron and Chris Glass found themselves designing the new logos for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) team.

As the 20th TYPO design event comes to a close, Aaron's view that you should, "Say yes a little more than you say no, and do good work for good people," is, much like the man himself, a hard one to ignore.

Computer Arts has teamed up with TYPO to bring you an exclusive offer that we'll be promoting throughout the conference.

Simply sign up to a two-year subscription to Computer Arts magazine and only pay for one!

In the opening talk of the last day of TYPO Berlin, Aaron James Draplin shared some ‘tall tales from a large man,’ covering the importance of saying yes more than no, and how working for friends led him to designing for the president.

The man behind Draplin Design Co. might have been jet-lagged, but this larger than life character showed no sign of flagging as he bolted through 130-odd slides, covering recent logo work, favourite Bauhaus archive material, and several photos of his sausage dog Gary.

The core of Aaron's philosophy is work for the right people for the right reasons, and you'll flourish, something he's been living by since he designed his friend's logo for a hot dog pop up stand. This was before he washed dishes for four summers to get money for a computer, he says, and after going freelance in 2004.

"I found a way to work with my friends. It got better every year. There was not much money, but then freelance brought in some, and how much money do we need?"

The point is made as Aaron put up the Cobra Dogs logo against his Air Max 360 logo, which he did for Nike. "Nike wanted everything yesterday. There’s loads of work, then it explodes everywhere, and then it disappears - too weird,” he explains.

Ultimately, he got more work from helping others than taking the big company dollar. "Not everything is about cash and making money. We forget that we can make our own things."

A case in point is Aaron's Field Notes series of memo notes. Inspired by the notebooks of the 1920s, they're now sold in 1,000 plus stores in the US. "I think compromise is a big deal in design, so I'd reduce [my fee] with a client. But with Field Notes, every dollar we get back is ours."

Of course, Aaron isn't suggesting designers should say yes to every client, pointing out that, "We have something valuable - clients need something from you."

The point is to be OK with letting your passions push you. With president Obama’s inauguration, his new logo caught Aaron's eye. He got obsessed with it, collected images of it on cakes and as tattoos. Then the White House called, and Aaron and Chris Glass found themselves designing the new logos for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and the Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) team.

As the 20th TYPO design event comes to a close, Aaron's view that you should, "Say yes a little more than you say no, and do good work for good people," is, much like the man himself, a hard one to ignore.

Computer Arts has teamed up with TYPO to bring you an exclusive offer that we'll be promoting throughout the conference.

Simply sign up to a two-year subscription to Computer Arts magazine and only pay for one!

Today's new design graduates face a unique set of challenges – and how to present a portfolio is one of the biggest.

Portfolio formats are evolving all the time. Just as big agencies and studios struggle with how best to present work to potential clients, designers searching for jobs have all sorts of decisions to make when it comes to creating a stunning portfolio to show a creative director.

Do you put it up on Behance and email out a link when you apply for a job? Should you make a flashy iPad presentation to swipe through in the interview? Would it be better to buy a big, old-fashioned folio book and fill it with high quality print-outs of your latest and greatest projects? Maybe something even more imaginative is what's expected?

It would be lovely if there was one sure-fire answer to all of these questions, but really it depends hugely on who's doing the hiring. Every creative director has different needs in terms of the job itself, and they all have different tastes when it comes to presentation. But instead of trying to guess what's expected of you, the best thing to do is to focus on your work and let it guide your decisions.

"I do like a physical portfolio – an iPad presentation can be good too," muses Karen Jane, head of design at Wieden+Kennedy London.

"Ultimately, your discipline is likely to dictate how the work is best presented. If you have a range of work you may want to present on screen but have some printed pieces too. Or your work may be entirely screen based. It's about putting the work across in the best way."

Working in a big, global agency with so many different clients, Jane oversees a huge variety of projects. So it makes sense if you're aiming to work for a big agency to develop a portfolio that demonstrates your versatility.

"A range of work is really important, one that shows off how you tackle different projects. The range of projects we work on here at Wieden+Kennedy is pretty broad so it's good to be able to see versatility in a portfolio."

Employing 10 people – though they're hiring a few more designers – Leeds-based Golden is much smaller than W+K, so co-founder and creative director Rob Brearley takes a slightly different approach to portfolios. Personality often plays an important role in a small organisation, and showing that you understand the studio and its mission helps.

"We're looking for 'golden people' who share our vision, talented visual thinkers, who can turn their hand to anything," says Brearley. "Initially I'd prefer to be contacted with either a link or PDF attachment of work examples – a brief, well-presented taster of who you are and what you can do," he continues.

"For face-to-face interviews, I don't mind what format the work is presented in, either print or digital. The format should be invisible, allowing the work to shine through," says Brearley.

"It should be bold, simple and ultimately relevant to the work and the personality of the presenter. Folio presentations should flow smoothly, without awkward paper folds or software glitches. Think it through carefully."

It's a similar story if you apply to Steve Richardson, co-founder and creative director at Mr B & Friends in Bath. The agency started off small but has grown fast and roles they're recruiting for include artworkers and middleweight developers. There might also be a spot coming up for a senior creative.

What Richardson looks for is a practical and direct form of presentation."I don't mind how someone shows their portfolio, as long as it gives a really good snapshot of their skills and talent," he explains.

If impressed, a creative director like Richardson will then want to find out what you're really like via an interview. As with Golden, it's a case of proving you're the person they're looking for in terms of work and personality.

"I'm much more interested in the individual, hearing from them what they have achieved and what makes them tick, to make sure the cultural fit is right for my team. Then it's about the portfolio, how they present, is the candidate engaging, do they look interested, have they credibly done this work and can they talk about it fully," says Richardson.

Telling your story, as well as the stories behind your work, is a crucial criterion for a successful portfolio if you're applying to Kjetil Wold at the Norwegian agency Anti.

Wold is co-founder, creative director and consultant with the company, where there's a growing emphasis on motion at the moment. Because motion work requires narrative, Richardson is keen to find designers and animators who understand this. The ability to explain concepts and show purpose is what he looks for.

"We always look for people who understand concepts and storytelling, and can make excellent visuals. We want to see work that's anchored in a reason for being there. Right now we're searching for more motion-graphic designers because everything needs to be in motion these days," he says.

"The best thing is to start off with an online reference to give us a reason to say, 'Hi'. It could be a link to your work on Behance, or impress us even more with a well-designed personal site. Then we might meet up and see if your personality and the arguments behind your solution actually match what we're looking for."

There's no denying that when it comes to showcasing your portfolio, Behance is ahead of the game. However, recent months have seen a surge in Behance-like sites, such as Desinion as well as others. Hiive is another such site, which aims to combine the portfolio aspects of Behance with the connectivity of LinkedIn to produce a creative site with a difference.

We sat down with editor Ciaran Burke to find out what makes Hiive stand out from the crowd and what he hopes the site will do for the creative community.

We've set up Hiive to become the professional network for creative people. Hiive allows professionals, companies and course providers to kick-start creative connections with jobs, projects, courses, knowledge and people.

If you're a creative it's a fantastic place to showcase your talent or business, discover opportunities and ultimately grow your network.

The idea was born out of the success of the creative industries. The industries grew by almost 10% in 2012, representing 5.6% of UK jobs. We needed an online platform that could champion these industries, encourage this growth and get creatives talking to one another within and across the different sectors.

Not only that but there was and still is a huge need to open up careers in the creative industries to a much broader, more diverse demographic across the UK. We now feel we have created a website that has the ability to do just that through giving people a platform to showcase their talent.

There are a lot of great sites for the professional communities, like LinkedIn, and others for a creative audience, like Behance and Dribbble, but none that brings everything together in one place for individuals, businesses and course providers.

With Hiive you can showcase your skills and portfolio as well as connecting with other creatives and influencers. Users can learn new skills and collaborate across Hiive Swarms, our new microsites.

If you're a business, you can find new talent and connect with other companies facing similar challenges and opportunities. If you offer courses, we have a community of over 10,000 creatives desperately keen to keep learning and getting better at what they do.

Yes, it is part of Hiive's ethos to help make the creative industries more diverse. Thankfully it's becoming a lot easier for new talent to get into the creative industries because social networks are helping to break down the traditional barriers you had to get through to see an employer.

With Hiive we want to bring those barriers down another level. By being able to being able to bring all of your online content into one place as a cohesive portfolio on Hiive, it's much easier to be discovered by the right people, regardless of your background.

We have a great team with a wide range of skills, and we're constantly asking our users for feedback. This really helps Hiive to evolve, and new features are constantly cropping up on the site as a result of this feedback such as freelancer availability, the ability to use gifs and the need to build our own audio player.

We were probably guilty of trying to build too many things at once, so I think it is always a good idea to prototype an idea, test it out with your target demographic and then get it to a level that is ready for market instead of trying to do every feature at once.

The Hiive Agency is something I'm very excited about. It's all about unlocking the talent in the Hiive community through generating paid commissions for them. I can't say too much at the moment but we've already had some incredible ideas flying around.

We want Hiive to be synonymous with people in the creative industries. The day is coming when I'll overhear someone saying, "Oh, I saw your Hiive," and that will please me greatly.

Jon Burgerman's ready-made design work is instantly recognisable. Doodles and hijacked photography, cardboard cut-out installations that break down barriers between artist and audience. He's a designer inspired by people, and at this year's graphic design convention TYPO Berlin, he's just told the people how he does it.

In his talk 'Chasing the Ferret', the Brooklyn-based artist broke down his global success into four key elements. "I've done a lot of commercial work," he tells us, "but I haven't so much sold my soul as licensed it off." And to great success too! Here’s how he's done it.

In his talk, Jon played the packed Berlin crowd a video of a ferret that crashed a football game. His point is simple, and simply applied to design.

Improvise in the face of adversity. Intuitively make stuff. Don't self edit. Jon noted that sketchbooks are immediate, easy and cheap. And who's to say that that sketchbook is always a preperation for something else.

Think of your sketches as the final art. Turn it into a flipbook, or start creating cheap and quick animations. Basically...

Use whatever's to hand. Jon was given a camera for a present, so he incorporated that into his work, drawing in things to the snaps. "Cheap and quick can be better than expensive and laboured," he says. It's something he’s taken from his mentor Claes Oldenburg, who famously said that he didn't want art to sit on its arse and collect dust.

Take an object, adopt it, play with it. "Your environment can be altered momentarily, in not a lasting way, and I love this kind of design," he says. Travelling around Korea, Jon found himself riding the subway a lot, and so invented a new game – giving people new bodies.

His reaction to action film posters with him being shot went viral, which brought up interesting questions about commercial art in public spaces. "It's totally permissible to brandish weapons in these posters, but you can’t show a lit cigarette because that may hurt people." In short, Jon says allow your imagination to be the raw material, and...

Perhaps the hardest thing to follow on the list, making yourself less self-critical, and not allowing doubts grow into an all consuming state of mind can do two things. Open up creative possibilities, and allow you to have fun!

"That notion of 'we're not meant to be doing this' is both harmful and helpful. It's not true – you should try out anything. But also it's good to kick out against. Of course you should be doing it."

Inspired by street artist Banksy's claim to be making luxury products, Jon decided to make a new iPhone out of wood and sell it for $300 a pop. Then came his Molex cardboard watch line, his t-shirts, "with all the brands on them", and his Louis Kitton handbags. Nothing sold, and, yet by ignoring the idea of failure, it really didn’t matter.

For Jon's The Artist is Presently Doodling project, he set one minute for he and a member of the public to draw a portrait of the other. With no time for a fair representation of each person’s full drawing skills, something unique was produced. What you can take from such an experiment? "If you can’t be good be different."

By making a game out of your work, you'll encourage people interacting – and that should be the goal of all designers. Set something up for people to come and make it their own.

Jon created a gallery of colourful cardboard props where people made their fun. He’s laid down drawing for and people to colour them in. "Set things up and invite people to come and collaborate, break and make things. And it's okay to not know what you're doing – unless your a doctor," Jon says. "Innovation is another way of saying happy accident. Not expecting everything to be amazing is good."

Here at Creative Bloq, we're big fans of typography and we're constantly on the hunt for new and exciting typefaces – especially free fonts. So, if you're in need of a font for your latest design or just like to keep a collection so you're prepared, we may be able to help out.

Download the best free fonts

Every day, we're running 'Font of the day', where we'll be posting the best free and paid-for fonts the web has to offer.

A new handwritten font for 2015, Serendipity was created by the team at design agency Maroon Baboon. Including 90 different hand drawn characters for a range of languages and dialects, Serendipity is currently available to download for free over on Creative Market. But hurry – this offer ends soon!

One of the biggest challenges of a new branding project is ensuring your design is consistent across all platforms, touch points and territories. The worst mistake you can make is to create a brand that is impossible and impractical for the client to implement and use.

Be inspired by these outstanding uses of colour in branding

So how do you do create the perfect branding in an increasingly complex world? Here are five tips from leading designers…

Rolling out a brand across different touch points and territories is less about consistency and more about coherence. It's about having a set of core brand elements to draw upon and flex across multiple brand channels – says Karen Hughes of True North – rather than just having a logo in the top left hand corner of everything.

Designers shouldn't limit their thinking with practicalities, but they do need to remember that at some point a brand will have to be used by the client to create PowerPoints, word templates, and so on. Ignoring this point will only come back to haunt you later down the line.

Digital applications can be some of the biggest hurdles when it comes to brand consistency. "For some reason they are often regarded as their own niche without approaching them in a more holistic way," says Gareth Howat of hat-trick.

"[Digital] is often boxed off as a separate exercise – it should be the opposite. Early involvement of digital designers or teams is crucial to avoid this problem."

Taking a more principled approach to graphic design is key in achieving consistency across touch points. "So rather than a rule book that tells you how to apply the brand in a given situation, we think much more about principles," says Jon Hewitt, creative director at Moving Brands.

"It's about giving inspiration to designers to understand the best way that they can apply the brand to any situation."

Brand guidelines are still the ultimate tool to keep branding consistency, according to R/GA's Lucio Rufo. "Our goal is to help clients understand that consistency builds recognition, and recognition leads growth."

"The brand is not only solely based on a logo, so it's important to map out all the possible touch points, and from there establish all necessary guidelines."

If you've created some outstanding branding in the last 18 months, you're eligible to enter the Brand Impact Awards.

They're judged by an elite panel of designers and client-side creatives from global brands like Coca-Cola, and aim to celebrate the industry's best branding across more than 20 different market sectors.

Beyond a stunning piece of design work, the judges are looking for consistency of application across various touchpoints. Work will be judged according to the market sector for which it was designed.

The deadline for entries is . You can find out more about the Brand Impact Awards here, and enter your work today though the Brand Impact Awards website. Good luck!

Jose Miguel Mendez

Across the UK, graduates are busy preparing for their final year exhibitions. We've collated an extensive list of degree shows taking place this year, so you can easily find out what's happening near you, and when.

We're not going to lie: there's a lot to take in – so we've made it a bit easier for you. Want them in date order? Just scroll down… (Or jump directly to June or July.) Prefer them alphabetically? Here's an A-Z for you.

If we've accidentally missed your show, please drop us a line at hello@computerarts.com.

And don't forget to take advantage of Computer Arts' half-price subscription offer for students and new graduates, at the end of these listings. Enjoy!

Camberwell College of Arts' foundation show is followed by its Undergraduate Sumer Show, which kicks off 22 June.

Opens with a private view on Thursday 14th; open to the public from the 15th. The university's Prep show is followed in June by its higher education summer show on Friday 19 June.

For BA and MA Fine Art info, head down to Degree Show One listings on 27th May, and for graphic design it's Degree Show Two, from 24 June.

18–28 May 2015
Buarth Mawr, Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, SY23 1NG

This year the School of Arts and Creative Industries launches its new Creative Industries Festival together with its annual Graduate Degree Show from 22-31 May. (Private viewing and Family and Friends 21 May).

Alongside the exhibition, there will be screenings, music, performances, exhibitions, workshops and talks by students, staff and special guest speakers including renowned graphic designer Vaughan Oliver. Head to the site for further event details. Open Monday to Friday 11am-7pm, (weekends 10am-5pm).

Private view 22 May, 6-10pm.

Leeds College of Art was the highest-ranked independent art college in the 2014 Guardian league table. This first show is for its Foundation Diploma in Art & Design, with BA design-focussed courses exhibiting from Saturday 13th June.

The University of the Creative Arts' multi-part graduate show season kicks off at Farnham, the alma mater of Computer Arts' very own art editor Jo Gulliver.

CSM's show includes its BA and MA Fine Art courses, as well as MA photography and moving image work. The more design-focused Degree Show Two runs from 24–28 June. 

Private view on 28 May; public view from Friday 29 May, 10am-5pm.

Business view - 28th May, 6-8pm, friends and family view - 29th May 6-8pm and public viewing open on 30th May from 11am.

N2NW represents the current BA Hons Visual Arts students at Glasgow Kelvin College/Duncan of Jordanstone. Open Mon-Fri 8am-5pm.

Students studying Architecture, Fashion, Fine Art, Graphic Design and Illustration, Popular Music Studies and Spatial Design will be showing work this year across five different floors. Open 10am-6pm

This is a mixed discipline exhibition taking place at multiple venues and work will include painting, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture, film, photography and digital art. Private view - 29 May, 6-8pm. Public - 30 May, times vary.

Private view Friday 29 May, 6:30-0pm; open to the public 30th May. The Graphic Design course has a cracking website - check it out.

Private view 29 May; public exhibition from 30 May

Private view Thursday 30 May 5-8pm; public exhibition from Friday 31 May, 10am-4pm (times vary throughout the week)

You'll find the graphic design graduates exhibiting as part of a large public exhibition showcasing work from a variety of different courses.

BA Graphic Communication, Illustration and product Design amongst a varied range of courses on show. Open Sat-Thursday 10am-6pm and Friday slightly different hours.

Grahic Design, Illustration, Digital Arts, Games Design and more on display. Open 10am-4pm (closed Sunday)

Private view Saturday 30 May, 1-7pm. Public view from 31 May, times vary throughout the week.

It's a frustrating fact of life that clients don't always appreciate the value of good design. So what can you do when faced with a client who just doesn't get it?

Being able to educate clients on the value of design is a crucial skill. Communication, as always, is key: you need to involve your clients in all stages of the creative process, and make your case early – as these three industry pros explain…


"Occasionally we have to 'make the case' for design, perhaps with a less experienced client who views the process as a 'client/supplier' model rather than collaborator," says branding legend Michael Johnson, who founded brand consultancy johnson banks.

"But in order to get a large-scale branding project, we will have made the case for change months – sometimes years – before the design actually starts. In other words, our clients have clearly committed to the process. It's our job to subtly educate, inform and inspire as we go through the process – without coming across like idiots, obviously."


"Branding is no longer something that sits with the marketing department, a brand is something that sits at the heart of a client's business and organisation, and affects everything they do," says Karen Hughes, crative director at True North.

"As well as increasing profits, an effective brand can mean happier employees, engaged audiences, better products and services, greater brand awareness and recognition.

"[To convince a client of this], try to take the subjectivity out of decisions," she continues. "Don't just talk about colours and fonts, talk about the reasons behind your design choices."

"All the time, link these choices back to the original brief and always link the creative back to the core business aims and brand proposition." 


Helping clients appreciate and value design makes a designer's life so much easier, agrees Gareth Howat, creative director at hat-trick. Like johnson banks, the London-based multidisciplinary design company also won big at last year's Brand Impact Awards.

"It does help to have a clearly thought-through logic to your work, and we spend a lot of time thinking about how to communicate that," Howat explains. "That way clients are far more likely to appreciate your design strategy."


If you've created some outstanding branding in the last 18 months, you're eligible to enter the Brand Impact Awards. Judged by an elite panel of designers and client-side creatives from global brands like Coca-Cola, the Awards celebrate the industry's best branding across more than 20 different market sectors.

Beyond a stunning piece of design work, the judges are looking for consistency of application across various touchpoints – and work will be judged according to the market sector for which it was designed.

The deadline for entries is 5:30pm 18th June. You can find out more about the Brand Impact Awards here, and enter your work today though the Brand Impact Awards website. Good luck!

Jose Miguel Mendez

Here at Creative Bloq, we're big fans of typography and we're constantly on the hunt for new and exciting typefaces – especially free fonts. So, if you're in need of a font for your latest design or just like to keep a collection so you're prepared, we may be able to help out.

Discover the best free cursive fonts

Every day, we're running 'Font of the day', where we'll be posting the best free and paid-for fonts the web has to offer.

Today's typeface of choice is sans serif Brooklyn Samuels, created by Stockholm-based type designer Hans Samuelson. Available from MyFonts, the font is described as being 'based on geometrical shapes, intended primarily for headline use but also offers excellent legibility in small sizes'.

Brooklyn Samuels is available to purchase over on MyFonts.

Branding and identity design aren't about creating a brand in isolation and handing it over to the client. The process involves close collaboration with the people who live and breathe that brand on a day-to-day basis.

However, even if you have the best collaborative relationship with your client, things can still go wrong. With that in mind, here are three typical problems that can arise during a branding project – with pro advice on how to tackle them…

One of the most common problems on branding projects can be the client changing the brief during the design process. 
To deal with this, designers need to define the clear aims and objectives, and agree these before starting the project, advises Karen Hughes of True North.

"If we don't do this, it can have a knock-on effect on the process. It's important to us to work closely with our clients to define what they want and need to develop, so we're all in agreement before the project begins. It's about working as a team with clients and understanding their business objectives."

Dealing with more than one person during a design project can be challenging. But more often than not, there is more than one person calling the shots on a branding project. "So you need to agree from the beginning who will be the core working team who will make final decisions," says Hughes.

"Trying to please everybody is impossible, and often with multiple stakeholders 

pleasing everyone can be a challenge. For this reason, it is important to agree and to prioritise the important key stakeholders and engage with them from the very beginning of the project."

Creating the brand is just the start of the work. Clients need to be aware that it doesn't stop there – once the new brand has been agreed, it needs to be implemented across every part of the business in order for it to be a success.

"Educating clients on the implications of a new brand and getting them excited about the opportunities ahead is important," says Hughes.

Getting the guidance right on how the work should be implemented is also crucial, adds Jon Hewitt, creative director at Moving Brands. "The challenge often lies in how to ensure that design teams don't go too far, or not far enough." Often that means training, and making sure there are best practice examples of how to use the brand available.

If you've created some outstanding branding in the last 18 months, you're eligible to enter the Brand Impact Awards. Judged by an elite panel of designers and client-side creatives from global brands like Coca-Cola, the Awards celebrate the industry's best branding across more than 20 different market sectors.

Beyond a stunning piece of design work, the judges are looking for consistency of application across various touchpoints – and work will be judged according to the market sector for which it was designed.

The deadline for entries is 5:30pm 18th June. You can find out more about the Brand Impact Awards here, and enter your work today though the Brand Impact Awards website. Good luck!

Jose Miguel Mendez

Volunteers and staff work together on the CCARP collections processing project.

Volunteers provide valuable industry knowledge in processing in CHM collections.

Here at Creative Bloq, we're big fans of typography and we're constantly on the hunt for new and exciting typefaces – especially free fonts. So, if you're in need of a font for your latest design or just like to keep a collection so you're prepared, we may be able to help out.

Discover the best free cursive fonts

Every day, we're running 'Font of the day', where we'll be posting the best free and paid-for fonts the web has to offer.

Today's typeface of choice is GEOM by designer and art director Danilo Gusmão Silveira. Inspired by basic geometric forms and grids, this display typeface was an experimental project by Silveira, which he now very generously offers as a free download.

GEOM is available to download free for personal and commercial use over on Behance.

Running an agency in Ukraine in the last couple of years has not been easy.

According to the All-Ukrainian Advertising Coalition, the media market has lost 20 per cent of its income in the last year.  This market directly depends on clients' budgets, and these are continually falling because of disappearing markets in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, fluctuating exchange rates, and a fall in people's purchasing power.

As a result, some creative and media agencies have disappeared altogether, while even the largest ones have had to reduce staff.

Under such difficult circumstances, some businesses might react by expanding into new markets. But creative and media products are not always so easy to export abroad, due to the specific nature of the market, the highly competitive climate, a lack of local qualifications and often the necessity of a physical presence.

In digital agencies, one product that be exported globally is websites, especially design, programming and UX. For this, the understanding of market specificity isn't required as it is with creative, strategy or media services. So bright opportunities for expansion to new markets are open to Ukranian digital agencies in Kazakhstan, Russia, USA and Poland.

Kazakhstan looks now especially attractive. In general, Kazakhs don't possess the necessary qualifications and experience that Ukraine's professionals can deliver. They also offer better financial conditions in terms of foreign currency.

And what about clients? Many clients' businesses basically run on importing goods, so they have been forced to increase prices. That, plus the lower purchasing power of the population, has led to falling profits. The very first reaction to this is usually to minimize advertising and marketing budgets.

But clients also know that cutting back on advertising and marketing will make it more difficult to maintain their leading position. So this is driving them to seek greater returns on the money they do spend.

This is accelerating the trend away from traditional media to the internet, where rewards are easier to calculate and market entry threshold is lower. Before the crisis, the main priority was to produce a 'wow-effect' in the relevant manager. But now, more attention is being paid to sequential logic, final output and measurable return on marketing investment.

By capitalising on this trend at Aimbulance Agency, our positions during last year remained stable. This stability stemmed from our strategy to prioritise efficiency of communication.

Aiming to find the way out of a complicated economical situation, we took the decision to export our product (websites: programming and design) to markets abroad.

And although our work is of international standard – just check out out Cannes Lions, Golden Drum and EFFIE Awards if you don't believe us – we offer reasonable prices (cost of service per hour was $50; it's now $25).

The quality of advertising work for the Ukrainian market is going to get worse. That's made clear already by observing local advertising festivals: they're getting fewer project applications, and those they receive increasingly don't match up to expected standards.

That's because some agencies have reoriented and left the local market altogether, resulting in a talent drain that's bad for the national industry as a whole

Exporting work to foreign markets but at the same time staying in touch with local markets is needed to help stabilizise the Ukrainian sector. By combining both markets, the agency will get income in a variety of currencies, stabilising income.

If other agencies can follow our example and supply services to local and overseas clients, business in our country will continue to grow. This will create a virtuous circle, as new job positions are created locally, and agencies with international experience will also seek to work in Ukraine.

Roman Havrysh

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