Degree Show 2008: Graphic Design & Photography

This project here is about public space
and what I've gone and done is I've cut out 200
letter forms and I've gone into a public environment
and left them behind.
They all feature kind of rhetoric statements about public space,
which have been left behind for people to react to
and to understand and talk about in their own way.
OK, so after going into the environment and
creating all these typographic interventions
about public space I documented it and photographed it into a book.
Because it's about public space I made it into a two person
book which you have to use space itself to talk about
the public space which the books are about.
At the end there is a selection of these little stickers where
you can go back into public space and frame your own
definition of what good or bad public space is.
From the start it is always about ideas
so whatever your idea you feel that you should be doing
Kingston will have the resources to help you do it.
We don't just go and make films for the sake of
just making a film, it's all about 'I had this idea on such-and-such a project',
and then we had the facilities to help it manifest into a film.
Kingston is very career minded; we are ready to be doing what we are doing now
in an industry-based way. It is just a case of going out
there and getting the work and carrying on I guess.
This is a project I did for the E4 music competition,
basically trying to communicate how the wide range of music that comes together
to form the 4 music channel;
and this is a still from one of the animations that I did
where a TV would come across and spit out hundreds of different records
and then they'd sort of group together and form the E4 logo.
There is a really good animation department here that helped out.
It is quite good in fact because you really get to try
so many different things here - like I never thought I would
be doing animation or a load of stop frame
on a graphic design course.
They encourage you to go out into other fields like film and stuff.
What they really push at Kingston, is they push
about the idea so as long as you have a strong concept behind
something then they let you go in any direction.
We've tried animation, we do websites, do photography, do typography.
So when you leave you have a real broad range of skills
so you can almost get a job in anything you want really. Well hopefully!
This is a typeface based from a brief set from the DNAD
to create three horror film festival's posters.
Basically what I did was based on peoples' reactions
that you get whilst watching horror films.
I created three posters. One was 'gasp', one was 'scream', one was 'hide';
and they were all spelt out, a bit like this was, by
using the reactions to spell the words. It was to experience the London Horror Film Festival
so it was very to the point, very simple just using the mediums
that I had been taught over the past three years.
The tutors were really helpful because in terms of teaching stuff -
whenever you think you may always have quite a nice idea that comes up,
they will always push you to try and get it to get it up to a standard
even if to any outsider or anyone else it can seem acceptable,
they are always going to be pushing you harder and harder
to try and break those boundaries which is good. It is a lot of hard work
and you lose a lot of sleep doing it but are thankful for it at the end.
You feel more ready because you have been pushed so
hard to go out there and start working although you may know nothing.
So really it's not the end of the degree show it is just the beginning!
The piece behind me, which is known as 'Useless',
is basically a project to help encourage people to recycle shoes.
The inspiration behind this was basically that in the UK
we use 260 million pairs of shoes each year.
Half of them are kind of recycled but not really.
This kind of poster hopes to encourage people to do a bit more with them
than just send them to recycling plants and get them to be reused for other stuff.
What we are quite encouraged at Kingston is to kind of deal with issues.
It is quite a big thing at Kingston and this is obviously something I've kind of picked up on
in the last few years. The interesting thing to me is
dealing with stuff that has a kind of an issue. Rather than just making a comment piece
where you say 'this is that, isn't it cool', I wanted to say
something that was a bit more, kind of a bit of a 'wow' factor, a bit of
'I didn't realise this was how much we wasted'.
Which is, you are encouraged a lot in the second year to look at diferent things like that
rather than the obvious which is quite a lot about this course.
It is always questioning stuff,
looking at things differently and thinking,
'how can I do it differently?'.
It is definitely a bonus to this course.
You need to have that influence from other people
who have been in the industry or are in the industry.
It is good to have that, otherwise you would find yourself
floating off and not perhaps zoning yourself in so much as to what the
industry are looking for and what could be interesting to the industry.
So in that sense the tutors kind of help bring you
and get you back down to earth, almost give you help
into how you can influence the industry a lot more.
The reason I chose Kingston was pretty much because of
its studio atmosphere where everyone is actually in the studio working together
and sticking things up on the walls which you don't get at a lot of colleges.
Whereas this place still keeps that practice and people from industry
that came from Kingston do actually still do that practice in the industry.
They are still there sticking things on the wall,
marking things up, scribbling all over stuff - they still do that which is really nice to see.