Graphics graduate at D&AD
Thu, 03 Jul 2014 10:44:00 BST
Laura Hudson, a Graphic Design graduate was selected, along with fellow students, to showcase her work in Design and Art Direction’s (D&AD) New Blood annual exhibition. Her work stood out and was displayed along with other design graduates from universities and colleges around the UK at the Shoreditch Spitalfields Market in London. Laura has also won one of this year’s Chancellor’s Prize awards for Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design.
Laura told us “my final year project broadened my creative horizons and really broke me out of my professional comfort zone.”
Laura entered the showcase with a self-written project for the mental health campaign “Time to Change” which aimed to raise awareness of mental health and illness. Laura designed this in a way that was creative, engaging and commanded the attention of the audience in a pragmatic way to communicate its true significance in society. The concept created a striking visual metaphor, in which the process mirrored the invisible nature of mental illness within society.
Her project focussed around the imagery of 'making the invisible visible' and, taking inspiration from Oscar Diaz's ink calendar, she utilised the natural capillary action of paper to enable ink to absorb up a laser cut typographic message.
Laura worked on this project for almost 3 months and said “the project was a real investigatory journey, fraught with challenges, which as a designer I was forced to face head on using a trial and error methodology. This helped me to gain a huge amount of confidence in my abilities to execute an idea, and follow it until my vision is realised.”
Using hand drawn calligraphy, she created the intricate typographic message in which all the words are connected to allow the ink to spread upwards and be absorbed into the paper.
Laura told us “It gave me the skill of being very creative and resourceful in my approach to problems, allowing me to work around a variety of issues in a way that was maybe less logical but ultimately more effective. In this sense, it was a project that broadened my creative horizons and really broke me out of my professional comfort zone.”
