‘Sixtyone’ - The Newcastle University Student Design Exhibition

The 2008 Visual Communication graduates from the University of Newcastle are holding an exhibition starting on 21st November, and I happen to be one of them.

My cosy life as a university student ended this week, as it did for 60 of my peers - and we’re holding a student design exhibition to celebrate 3 years of hard work. I’ve been elected the Art Director / Web Designer for the exhibition this year, so I’ve been hard at work. I’ve created the theme, graphics and the website for the exhibition.

My illustrious employer, Newism, was gracious enough to sponsor us by giving us hosting space for the site.

Exhibition Poster 1 One of the posters for the exhibition.

The Details

The exhibition is open from 21st November - 5th December and is totally free. It’s being held at the University of Newcastle in the Design Building. The opening night, Friday 21st November, will be a special event, and is open to the public as well.

About the Exhibition

We’ve dubbed it ‘Sixtyone’ in honour of the sixty-one students graduating this year. The theme is ‘spread your creative wings’, referring to our newly discovered abilities and our future careers. Corny? Yes. But it wouldn’t be a student exhibition without the predictably cheesy references.

If anyone is interested in finding a young designer to recruit into their ranks, check out the site. I’ve included some easy ways to contact the students - either use the quick contact form on their profile page, or download their vCard (including embedded image) so you can contact them later.

Website Launch

As I mentioned, I created the website for the exhibition. This is essentially one big portfolio that houses the work of 60 designers. I would have liked to have spent more time on it and make it just that extra bit nice. I was given the opportunity to ditch support for IE6 (by myself), so achieving many of the effects was a much more pleasant experience.

One of the more interesting effects of the site is the live search drop down list which features the photo, name and title of the designers. To achieve this effect, I used the jQuery auto-complete plugin with some modifications, and some sleek ExpressionEngine queries. I’m considering writing up a little guide on how to do it.

Exhibition Poster 2 Another poster for the exhibition.

All of us from the exhibition hope to see you there, but if you can’t make it, check out the website. There are lots of very talented young designers.

Comments

The following 6 people were compelled to have their say. We encourage you to do the same.

Mat Packer said on Wednesday 12th November, 4:47pm: 1

Some very nice art work there. If you turn this into a little basic press release and send it on through I’m happy to promote it on the I’m With The Band website as a feature article.

Cheers
Mat
Peter said on Wednesday 12th November, 6:01pm: 2

Looks great! Congratulations to you on finishing!
Mark Bowen said on Monday 17th November, 8:50pm: 3

Hi Anthony,

Great work there, well done. Would be great to see a write up about the auto complete field for ExpressionEngine as I’m sure that would help out a lot of people. Really impressive that was. Only thing I did notice was that the images that load in are actually a lot larger than the icon that shows so when you get quite a long list it can take quite a while to load everything. Only noticed really as our internet is playing up at the moment and so is loading slower than a 28K modem!! :-)

Anyway excellent work and please count me in as the first to want to see an auto-complete tutorial with ExpressionEngine ;-)

Best wishes,

Mark
Lance Scaife-Elliott said on Sunday 21st December, 8:58am: 4

I really live the site design. Good work and as Mark said I too am interested in the Auto complete field for EE.

Actually which PNG fix did you use, I have trialed several and never really happy.

cheers Lance
Jason Buss said on Monday 9th February, 12:16am: 5

I would agree it would be great to see the write-up on auto complete jquery for EE.
Deron Sizemore said on Monday 9th February, 4:09am: 6

Great looking design! Count me as another that would love to see how you implemented the jQuery auto complete functionality with EE.