Bloody Students.
I went along to the Private View of D&AD New Blood last night to see some of the work from people graduating into the recession. It was great to see a high standard of work- particularly in terms of execution and presentation, although maybe a little less so in terms of big ideas.
The main difference on previous years however, was how much the internet has influenced the work on show. Firstly, it was hard to take a glance around the stand without seeing projects that looked like they’d just been pulled from the likes of FFFound. These online visual databases hadn’t really reached their peak whilst I was still studying, but it’s hard to see how we could do without them now, and their obvious influence on the style of work at New Blood was pronounced. The result is work that has become quite heavily stylised, self indulgent and designed by designers, for designers, rather than appealing to people on a more populist level. Though not often, it did appear that on some occasions, the ‘big idea’ was lost in favour of something that would simply look nice and re-blog very easily.
To this point, I was amazed by how much work I recognised as I was wandering round Olympia. A notable number of pieces on display had already done the rounds on the blogs- which made the whole experience more interesting for me. It’s like when you wander around an art gallery and get to look at work that you may have seen in a magazine, on TV or online, in the flesh- obviously especially important for printed work. A case in point is the lovely poster designs of Alan Clarke form my old Uni in Falmouth, which has been blogged and re-blogged religiously (and I’m a case in point here).
It’s impressive to see how internet savvy the graduates of today are- their ability to utilise the web as a tool to promote themselves often far beyond any professional agency is a testament to how committed and full of energy these new recruits can be. This is obviously far more important in the current climate, where web-savvy employers can get a glimpse of graduate work, snapping up talent far before events such as New Blood take place.
