D&AD New Blood

On Sunday 3rd July I went to a festival in London and realised that New Blood was on on that day so I went along to have a little peek.

The exhibition was just over the road from Spitalfields so it was a quick walk from Liverpool Street. I thought a photo of myself standing outside might do justice for this year's PDP! The photos aren't great as they're not straight and taken on a fairly standard camera.

This is one of my favourite pieces from the exhibition. It's hard to see in this photo but it is a huge colour by numbers piece playing on the fact that the human eye can see millions of colours. Each colour section has a number in, with many numbers into the 6+ digit mark

I like the design of the bags above. The handles look like handles on dog leads when it is being carried, like a doggy bag!! Good design, good colours, good doggies.

Toilet roll with Chanel and Ralph Lauren polo logos. I got the feeling there was a deeper meaning to this, but still a rather literal one.

A flip book with 3600 pages... the biggest I've seen! The pages are pictures of hearts ('love' hearts) beating bigger and smaller as you flick through to show the beating motions of the human heart.

A Monopoly board with a Tesco vibe. It wouldn't surprise me if they did release a Tesco version of Monopoly. The prices of the places on the board are shown using the instantly recognisable red circular price stickers. The design is printed on cloth and pinned to the wall which I thought was a really nice touch. It is different and unexpected in this context but opens my mind to using different materials

A wonderful example of paper engineering! The pages have been cut into thin strips and folded to make little people sitting high on sticks.

Mantelpiece, chandelier and skirting made of foam for the purpose of attracting visitors to look at the work from the University. I spoke to a student who was sitting at the stand and he seemed reluctant that the foam piece distracted from the actual work on the walls!

This made me laugh in a familiar way. The top one says "I make up for a complete lack of talent with heavy san serif fonts", the dark one says "Stealing fonts gave me this 2:1" and the bottom one says "I hope this mac distracts from how sh*t my work is". The things we all think but never say.

Colchester Institute had a stand! Oh yes. But opposite Kingston. Oh no. Good to see us in it, though. Hopefully it's something that both current and third year students at the Institute can become involved in.

These are reminiscent of the letters Chester made for first year PDP, but a bit bigger. The letter A beside this was covered in newspaper pages that had adverts for the exhibition on.