CGAA Class of 2011 @ New Designers 2011

If you happened by the CGAA baseroom right now, you'd find it crowded with a serious of mysterious, colourful cubes in a variety of sizes and your mouth watering in pavlovian response, craving the taste and texture of licorice allsorts... No, this isn't some take-over by Willy Wonka, but rather the course team's preparation for New Designers 2011 - the premiere London-based graduate show, at which a selection of this year's CGAA graduates will be exhibiting.

Preparations for the show began many weeks ago. Indeed, the visual concept for the new show was first cooked up between Alan and myself over a coffee at last year's ND event. Encouraged by CGAA's 'Best in Show 2010' prize, we were determined to push things a little further...

As per last year, we were keen to ensure that the CGAA stand didn't conform to the 'Apple Mac Showroom' trap, but rather use the space to say something about the course culture, and about the creativity of its graduates. We wanted to pick up on the idea that CGAA graduates leave the course with a shared skill-base (Maya as the common denominator), but whose projects encompass a variety of highly individualised creative responses - rather like...

And so it was that the exhibiting students were asked to create a series of abstract images deriving from their respective cg models with a distinct set of colour values to be applied to the surfaces of specially constructed cubes, ranging in size from 25cm up to 100cm, that would be used to create the exhibition space.

Diginate.com - a company specialising in stickers and vinyl transfers - very generously agreed to sponsor the CGAA show and printed all the artwork for us, and Tom and Alan spent an afternoon applying the large-scale transfers to the cubes. The course also owes UCA staff member, Glen Coleman, a big debt of gratitude for readying the artwork for Diginate's printers - thank you, Glen!

More CGAA @ ND 2011 updates will follow next week as we 'take the show on the road' and head up to London to install the exhibition and get everything ready for the private view and awards evening on Wednesday July 6th. Watch this space and wish us luck!