From 13-17 May, the MA graduates will exhibit their work at the LCC Nursery Gallery. Pieces on display will range from photographic to multimedia projects.

Uter Beyer will present Heimlich, a photo essay which explores 20 homes of impoverished people living in Tbilisi, Georgia. Tracey Fahy will show Rampage, an art installation that explores dance and news photography. Gunta Podina’s imagery will look at the everyday lives of Swedish people and what they do during their leisure time. Daniel Weill, will show a set of images based on the subject of time.

The landscape of Bosnia-Herzegovina serves as the subject matter for Lara Ciarabellini’s project Somnambulism. Veronika Lukasova has taken inspiration from space exploration, technology and particle physics for her project Machinate Mammal and Franziska Rieder created a book that explains how it feels to be a mother and an artist living in Germany.

Max Colson’s Hide and Seek is a cheeky project that unveils the sneaky, suspicious nature of plants. Linka Odom’s Spinning Compass project features a series of portraits of travelers she has encountered. Sahide Sanin’s images capture London’s Dalston area in the borough of Hackney.

Richard English tackles the tough subject of bereavement in his project Recollect while Italo Morales aims to shed light on the lives of young people living in Sarajevo with his book of portraits and candid shots. Christina Vazou’s Behind the Scene of the Greek Crisis is an incredibly personal project that shows her family’s struggle during the economic crisis in Greece.

For more of the latest Photography news, follow the Photography thread.

Chloe Taylor  (Nottingham Trent University) encourages readers to ‘embrace their ugly’ with her magazine which is full of images targeting the parts of the body people are most self conscious about and celebrating them. Fellow Nottingham student Ashley Dean, meanwhile, has created a charming children’s story which tackles the themes of diversity and body ideals through a rich, colourful narrative.

‘Through this zine we have tried to show beauty is relative and changeable, it cannot be defined or limited. So how can we allow ourselves to think we are not beautiful?’ explains Neha Bhushan (The Arts University College Bournemouth)

When creating her magazine, Sophie Marjoram (Nottingham Trent University) wanted to promote seeing a more diverse range of beauty and body ideals to help people think more positively about themselves.

Tilly Sleven  (University of Brighton) has created a magazine which is almost like a colouring book for adults. It encourages readers to get in touch with their playful side while reflecting on their perceptions of personal appearance.

Diversity NOW! is brought to you in association with i-D Magazine and supported by ARTS THREAD, Graduate Fashion Week, Own Label and sponsored by Succeed Foundation.

For more information and to find out about the other finalists, follow the Diversity Now thread.

In the run-up to the event, ARTS THREAD takes a look at last year’s winners.

Justin Anderson won the prize for Best Fashion FIlm and Best idea for his work Get Richard. The video, created for Vogue Italia starred up-and-coming designer Richaed Nicoll. The narrative shows the designer being bound and gagged before being dumped in the middle of the desert.

Tata Christiane won the prize for Best Fashion for her Comet Club collection, which featured in a fashion film created by Das Schloss.The gritty film shows models wearing Tata’s designs following a comet to its point of impact where they discover a human-alien being.

“The Game of Things” by Cristian Straub for Ethel Vaughn from Cristian Straub on Vimeo.

The Game of Things by Cristian Straub won the prize for Best Cinematography. The film, commissioned by Hamburg fashion brand Ethel Vaughn, is heavily inspired by the cinema of the late 60s and early 70s and depicts a woman mourning the end of a relationship, before taking a strange turn.

Calum MacDiarmid took home the prize for best music for his score for the short film Stamen, starring Katie Ball and Graham Dickson. And Guido Verelst and Dodi Espinosa were awarded the Best Esmod Production prize for their video shot in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerd, which is closed for renovations until 2017.

To apply for this year’s Berlin Fashion Film Festival click here. Deadline is 15 May.

No graphic design student or graduate should be without a copy of Fully Booked: Ink on Paper, published by gestalten. In our digital age, book and other print publications have the freedom to move away from their traditional role, moving into an era that promises to be the most exciting in print’s history.

Publications chosen range from brand publications and artist books to personal projects with small print runs. The tactile experience of the materials used is explored as well as innovative printing and binding techniques. Unexpected editorial and deign concepts are pushed to their limits.

Fully Booked: Ink on Paper is divided into five chapter; with each chapter representing a different key role played by print in today’s world: The Storyteller, The Showmaster, The Teacher, The Businessman, and The Collector.

Directional designers and design studios featured in the book include: Featured designers and design studios include Bruketa & Zinic, Coralie Bickford-Smith, Daniel Eatock, David Pearson, Double Standards, Erik Kessels, Heimann und Schwantes, Herburg Weiland, Isaac Tobin, Isabelle Vaverka, Jim Tierney, Johanna Fuchs, John Gall, Joost Grootens, Jung & Wenig, L2M3, Leftloft, Made Thought, Nicholas Felton, onestar press, Peter Mendelsund, Prill Vieceli Cremers, Ritator, Sam Ita, Stefan Sagmeister, Studio Laucke Siebein, Three Star Books, Visual Editions, and Zumtobel.

Beautifully designed by Matthias Hübner and edited by Robert Klanten, Matthias Hübner and Andrew Losowky, we cannot recommend this book highly enough!

For more on Fully Booked: Ink on Paper by gestalten

As part of Ventura Lambrate, the postgraduate Scuola Politecnica di Design SPD presented Call to Action! – great projects and an excellent example of exhibition display.

Set around a colour palette of militant red and black, alongside pale yellow and green, the protest banner theme of the school extended to the action-packed typeface. The school works with different partners across its five Mster programmes of Industrial, Interior, Transportation and Car, Visual, Web and Multimedia Design

Moving Milan is a project conceived with Volkswagon Group Design and sees the students create all-electric micro-sustainable vehicles for passengers and commercial use. Set within the context of the upcoming Milan Expo 2015, the projects include community-based fleets for socially-conscious families, energy-efficient and space saving taxi cars and eco-friendly service vehicles for the Expo.

The Mandalaki project is one of our favourites. Electric plugs and USB ports are brought directly onto the desk’s work surface. The easy to assemble desk has no screws and can be simply disassembled.

Using the universe of partner Maison Martin Margiela, students have designed a temporary hotel entitled Rue de la Maison aimed at art and design professionals and located in Paris over a one-storey vast post-industrial location.

Based on two among the most visionary books by Spanish author Enrique Vila-Matas, the Vila-Matas files project asks the student to re-interpret the text by combining it with other graphic elements such as photographs, drawings and diagrams in order to better express Vila-Matas’s rich imagery. Here the book is conceived as an object with solutions that surpass its traditional physical structure.

Call to Action! by Scuola Politecnica di Design SPD ran April 09-14 at Ventura Lambrate, Milan. See all the SPD programmes on ARTS THREAD.

For this year’s Milan, the Design Academy Eindhoven theme is Linking Process, for an exhibition of the work of 60 graduates, focusing on the process of getting to the finished article.

The curator Miriam van der Lubbe explains: ‘As exhibitions often show final results and finished designs, the process of getting there stays hidden. This overlooks the beauty of creation and ignores the relevance of development and innovation when a design is still unfinished. Crucial links to the public, the industry, co-creators, manufacturers, producers and many others are formed during ‘the making of’.

‘The phase of concept development, trial and error, sketching, building and rebuilding leads to new discoveries and cross-overs. The sooner these findings are shared with others, the better the chances of success. Valuable networks can grow from the early stages of the design process, boosting the potential of a single concept.’

Linking Process by Design Academy Eindhoven runs April 09-14 at Ventura Lambrate.

Image credits: Ya-Ling Hsiao photoghraphy Joost Govers

London: ARTS THREAD visited London’s Design Museum to take a look at the 99 entries for Designs of the Year 2013. Here we review the Graphic Design Category.

The Occupied Times of London is a newspaper that was first published during the 2012 Occupy London protests. The launch issue was written, designed and printed in just 40 hours, using a team of volunteers and a budget of £200.

Designers Tzortzis Rallis and Lazaros Kakoulidis responded to an appeal to help create a newspaper that could report on Occupy events and inform the public about the protesters’ aims. In less than two days they created a complete visual identity, a 12 page layout and the entire first issue. Containing two contrasting fonts, Jonathan Barnbrook’s punk-infused Bastard and Panos Vassiliou’s corporate-style PF Din Mono, the newspaper included back pages that could be used as placards during the protests. As the Occupy movement evolved, so did the newspaper; today it is a monthly A3 publication.

Anthony Burrill created contemporary pieces to sit alongside the originals in an exhibition of work entitled Made in Los Angeles featuring the Colby Poster Printing Co. The family-run company was founded in 1945 and still prints posters using the traditional silkscreen, woodblock and letterpress typesetting methods, using the 60′s-style acid colour palette seen in Anthony’s posters above.

The new Strelka Institute Identity is a complete rebrand for the Moscow postgraduate school and publishing house that promotes discussion and debate around contemporary architecture and design. Its rigorous grid system and dual-language text creates a framework that can be used across all printed and digital platforms. The design gives equal prominence to Cyrillic and Latin fonts and provides a grid structure for every piece of visual material the organisation produces.

An anthology of inspirational conversations with designers in India, Dekho probes their stories into the development of design in India and highlights approaches that are unique to designing for India. The book is one of the first local publications on design writing and offers a beautiful visual platform for discussions on the subject.

The title itself, which means ‘take a look’ in Hindi, invites readers to discover the new vernacular of India. The book is written, designed and published by Delhi studio CoDesign.

Designed by Pedro Nora, this is the bright and colourful identity for the Doc Lisboa documentary film festival.

Design studio Brighten the Corners collaborated with artist Anish Kapoor to create this two-volume publication: one book containing the lighting company’s business accounts; the second is a powerful exploration of pure colour that represents Anish Kapoor’s video installation ‘Wounds and Absent Objects’ in print.

Overall, the report reflects the core busies of a company that works with light and colour. While the financial pages use typographic features, the second publication features spherical art. Colours radiate from the middle of each spread, progressively deepening in tone towards the centre of the report. Using tactile, uncoated paper, the designers worked closely with the printers to experiment with deep saturated pigments. The final design pushed the printing process to its limits and used up to ten neon hues. The final publication offers an absorbing illustration of the emotive power of colour.

Exploding with unfolding pages and multiple directional text, Kapow! is set in the thick of the Arab Spring and it is guided by the high-speed monologue of an unnamed narrator. Kapow! asks readers to open and unfold pages, to follow text leaking in and out of paragraphs, while progressively becoming part of and lost within the narrator’s thoughts.

Designed by Studio Frith, the layout was created in close collaboration with the author while the novel was still being written. Evoking concrete poetry from the 1970s in a uniquely 21st century way, the design incorporates references from Google and other contemporary sources.

Design group Serviceplan were commissioned by Austria Solar to demonstrate the innovative nature of the comapany’s work with solar energy and created a beautiful and uniquely apt presentation of their annual report – printed with special ink that only materialises when exposed to the sun. In order to render the report completely white under artificial light, the printers needed to carefully mix the correct ratio of light-sensitive ink colours. Once competed, the report was sent inside a light-proof fool packet to business and political figures in Austria, generating interest in the potential of solar power.

Irma Boom has designed a new graphic identity for the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which incorporates a new logo, as well as a colour palette drawn from key pieces in the museum’s 900 000 collection of paintings, such as works by Johannes Vermmer and Karel Appel. The selected colours act as the museum’s ‘DNA’ and will be used in a variety of ways, including the development of visual merchandising. The identity also includes the new typeface de Rijksmuseum, designed by Paul van der Laan of the Bold Monday font foundry.

The recently reissued novels of Afro-American writer Ralph Ellison were updated by Cordon Webb with book covers that reference the imagery used on jazz records of the 40s and 50s to evoke the era in which the books were written. While researching the author, Cordon discovered Ellison’s keen interest in music, playing the trumpet aged eight and attending music school.

The theme of the Venice Architecture Biennale was Common Ground and designer John Morgan interpreted the theme by referencing the Venetian dialect of the city’s street signs. Known as Nizioletti or ‘white sheets’, these rectangular signs are traditionally stencilled onto the corners of buildings. Morgan’s designs used subtle alterations to their historic typeface and he and his team spent a month in the area, employing local production methods to create the stencilling used throughout the exhibition venues.

Situated in the Barbican Art Gallery, Bauhaus: Art as Life was the largest UK exhibition, to date, focusing on the iconic art school. Graphically, the design is informed by an awareness of the Bauhaus’ own principles of colour, structure and typography – painted walls and bold panels draw together objects, themes and ideas, and the typeface used throughout, Breite Grotesk, is a contemporary revival of the letterpress typeface used within the Bauhaus itself.

Designs of the Year 2013 runs until July 07 at The Design Museum with the overall and category winners to be announced next month.

With record-breaking advance bookings, David Bowie is – a massive hit exhibition for the V&A. ARTS THREAD confirms – this show lives up to the hype – don’t miss it!

A visual feast is on offer in the shape of more than 60 stage costumes from Bowie’s long career, including the iconic Ziggy Stardust bodysuits from 1972, designed by Freddie Burretti in collaboration with Bowie, and a famous, sculptural Kansai Yamamoto costume for the Aladdin Sane tour of 1973. Other highlights include album cover artwork – especially the still startling Diamond Dogs image by Terry O’Neill featuring a languid Bowie and an enormous leaping dog. Hand written lyrics and set lists are small gems that pop up throughout the exhibition, as well as Bowie’s hand-drawn storyboards, exhibited for the first time. The massive, floor to ceiling video wall brilliantly showcases some iconic tour moments, including un-seen footage. The sheer volume and variety of the man’s artistic output is hugely impressive – whether you are a Bowie fan or not.

The fusion of sound and vision is key to the show. Sponsors Sennheiser supplied the sound experience – headphones picking up signals in each space; automatically relaying music and commentary to the visitor, wonderfully complementing the stunning visuals.

The exhibition begins with displays of some of Bowie’s early artistic influences. Born David Jones, he officially adopted the stage name David Bowie in 1965, and was inspired by the youth culture that had emerged in Britain after the Second World War. He then began a pattern of chameleon-like persona changes that became a distinctive aspect of his career.

Those of us who were young teenagers in the 70’s can vividly recall the impact of his performance of Starman on Top of the Pops in July 1972. A beacon of glamour and trail-blazing androgyny – we watched in wonder from the confines of conventional sitting rooms. Annie Lennox, one of the stars who comment on Bowie’s influence at the time sums it up perfectly; “Thank God for David Bowie, who lifted us from the drabness of suburbia, and showed us glittering possibilities. Thank God for erotica, exotica, lean, mean, back beat, slim hipswing, saxophone overblown. Thank God for camp, thank God for fabulous hair cut and clothes. Thank you Dahling, kiss, kiss, kiss – A fan.“

Bowie has so far kept his distance from the exhibition, (curators think that David Jones does not want this to be seen as a vanity project), but he has allowed the V&A unprecedented access to his personal archive – over 300 objects are on display. There is something for everyone in this show: right from the start of his career, Bowie’s clear vision is apparent, and as composer, performer, songwriter, artist and designer there seems little limit to his talents. Aside from this however, the spectacular individualism that Bowie embodies has inspired and empowered countless people all over the world to be proud to express themselves, create their own identities, and to challenge convention.

Look out for a feature-length TV profile of Bowie on UK’s BBC2 in May – ‘David Bowie – Five Years’, a collaboration of the V&A and the BBC, which will feature much unseen footage. Focusing on five crucial years of his career, 1971, 1975, 1977, 1980 and 1983 before bringing the story up to date with his latest album.

In the meantime – go see!

David Bowie is continues at the V&A until August 11 2013.

Six groups were given a week to design their own app, with the view to improving the user’s life. Guided by Paolo Iabichino, executive creative director at OgilvyOne, the groups produced apps that touched on various different lifestyle sectors including travel, money, food, mobility and fashion.

Once the groups had created the concept for their happy app, they had to present their idea to senior OgilvyOne representatives and a panel of industry judges. The judges then selected a winning project, awarding the winning team with the opportunity to complete a professional internship.

Alexandra Balisova, Livia Galeazzi, Viktoria Shopolova and Olga Mikhailova were awarded the top prize for their Get Lost app. Rather than help people simply find their way from A-to-B, the app encourages the user to get lost and discover areas they may not have previously considered exploring.

Bruno Etzberger Lucini, Estefania Padierna, Joyce Hung and Mariana Chiesi created Wake, an app that lets users share the first moments of their day with their friends and loved ones. Davide Molinari, Malika Ablataeva and Fernanda Aguirre created a fictional character called Amy to represent the Explora app. The character gives users suggestions on how to make best use of their sparetime.

City SYNC by Ashley O’Neil, Sarah Gäbelein and Tatiana Trufanova helps car drivers become more connected. The app’s functions include route finding, signposting to car parks, discovering local cultural events, finding nearest emergency services and monitoring CO2 emissions.

Koen Huiskamp, Jessica Lee, Giulio Renelli and Leen Kondakji’s app +vicini challenges smartphone owners to complete random tasks. Davide Vignes, Edith Cecena and Gino Asiku created Flymood, an app that collects information from the user’s preferred social networks and makes them available while the phone is in flight mode. Allowing them to safely stay connected while in the air.

For more information on Scuola Politecnica di Design

Cape Town – ARTS THREAD interviews John Maeda, artist, graphic designer, computer scientist and president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). A speaker on Day 1 of the Design Indaba Conference, John’s key project at RISD, is to add art and design into the tight coterie of STEM education in the US (to create STEAM). STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

ARTS THREAD: Do you feel that the STEM to STEAM project has relevance to countries outside the US?

JOHN MAEDA: Yes, STEM to STEAM is picking up in America, we have 11 states on board and in the world today, a lot of interest. I found an interest in the UK, in China, Japan and in Turkey, so it’s all coming together. People know that STEM in important for innovation but Art is important to keep it desirable.

AT: And practically, how do you see it implemented in other countries?

JM: All those countries are desiring to develop better, more desirable products and services and they are now seeing that just having the technology is not a differentiating factor. Things like art and design help you differentiate. (Like your glasses for instance. I could buy black glasses but not those glasses, so it appeals to what you’re looking for). A good example is Apple, a STEAM-based company. They took a STEM product like an MP3 player and made it desirable through art and design.

AT: Another question, what is the best advice you could give to graduate students of design?

JM: I think that the only advice I could give to students right now, especially students coming from art and design, is to study copyright law and the implications of that, because it affects their profession, digitally and in the analogue world. The second place is to study emerging business models in the first world and the third world, because the way people do design is changing.

AT: Design students generally strive to stand out, to come up with something new and different. What are your views on innovation?

JM: I think that there’s always something new compared to what exists because the world gets bored very quickly. So yes, it might be old but because people haven’t heard of it in recent years, it becomes new again. So I’m not so down on ‘innovation’, because I’m not such a believer that everything is new. Everything is ‘new’ at the right time.

AT: So what can a young designer do to stand out?

JM: Study history because there’s a lot of ‘new’ stuff in history to find again.

AT: Thank you!

STEM to STEAM