New Designers 2017, Part 1
New Designers is a key event in the design calendar, bringing together design education, design consumers and the design industry to celebrate and recognise and the next generation of graduate designers.
3,000 of the most promising graduate talents from the UK’s leading design courses exhibit at the exhibition. The show features everything from illustration to animation, furniture to fashion, and gaming to glass and takes place at the Business Design Centre in London. It provokes fresh thinking and kick-starts careers, providing a pipeline of young talent into one of the UK’s leading sectors.
Our design team spent the day at the show, here’s a few of the graduates who caught our eye…
Sophie Hingston
Sophie is a printed textile designer graduating from De Montfort University. She specialises in designing prints for wallcoverings, interior products and stationery. Inspired by architecture, geometrics and organic form, her work is created by combining photography with intricate observational drawings and paintings which are then translated into digital and screen prints. We were particularly impressed with Sophie’s sensitive and timeless colour palettes.
Miki Asai
Miki is graduating from the Silversmithing and Jewellery course at Glasgow School of Art. Her jewellery is inspired by fleeting and changeable moments. Influenced by her Japanese aesthetic that finds beauty in impermanence, imperfection, transience and ephemerality. Working with mother of pearl, paper, shells, japanese lacquer, silver, gold and pearls she won the Goldsmith’s Company Award for Jewellery.
Sophie Orde
Sophie will be graduating from the Surface and Textile design course at Bucks New University. Her work focuses on how space can communicate direction through colour, pattern or material. Her display materials for a retail aim to direct attention around retail spaces to aid wayfinding. Manipulating plywood with marquetry, routing, laser cutting and sublimation printing she creates a bold eclectic look.
Beth Hunt
Beth is graduating from Bolton University with a degree in Textiles for Interiors. Beth’s work is inspired by matt clay colours with a clash of bold metallic accents inspired by Scandinavian design. Beth’s collection has been inspired by textures found within the urban environment, studied in depth to create patterns. The work includes experimental paintings that explore the brush as a mark-making tool, digital and hand printing processes.
Amelia Ellwood
Amelia graduated from the Textile Design course at Norwich University of arts. Working with a range of processes including screen printing, collage, drawing and digital manipulation, she creates playful large scale designs in distinctive colour palettes with a focus on mark making and cut paper. Amelia won this year’s Kalopsia Collective Associate Award.
Lauren Lawton
We met Lauren Lawton at last year’s New Designers, this year she was asked to exhibit at the One Year On section of the show. Since last year she has taken a studio at the Old Spode Factory in Stoke on Trent, and focused on her dyed and embellished fabric one-off pieces. By contrasting raw edged felt and paper combined with delicate silk she explores the subtle contrasts of colour, shape and texture.
You can visit New Designers, Part 2 which runs from 5-8th July at the Business Design Centre, London.