Every year students pit themselves against one another in a series of design and illustration competition briefs.
The Open College of the Arts' blog.
Every year students pit themselves against one another in a series of design and illustration competition briefs.
There was a time when comics were just for kids and artists made images for grown ups. I’m not sure if that many artists have been able to make the switch to working for a younger audience, but certainly illustrators and other narrative based artists have been able to successfully address a more adult...
Award winning cartoonist Steve Bell has a long relationship with the Guardian newspaper, not least with his regular IF cartoon strip that has featured in the newspaper since 1981. It’s a sharp and irreverent narrative of those in power, often portrayed alongside penguins, farmyard animals and the occasional badger. In a short film (4min)...
Art in prisons has a long and well-established tradition. It provides a way for inmates to express themselves, produce something of meaning or to simply help pass the long hours locked in a cell. As a open learning experience OCA is well placed to support students in prisons and over the last few years...
Portugal has a strong decorative tradition in its streets. Ever since the Moors introduced the vibrant tile tradition of the azulejos, houses have been faced in ceramic patterns. As a first time visitor to Lisbon I was struck by the visual quality of this work, often showing its age, overlaid by graffiti, or in...
OCA student Emil Nemecek shares his visual diary, interest in Czech graphic design and some of the challenges of studying graphic design in a second language.
As an OCA tutor I spend a lot of time waiting for parcels to arrive in the post. The small heavy package that arrived last week was not a student assignment but a brand new metal casting of Rockwell 30pt. Like a growing band of typography and letterpress enthusiasts I have recently purchased my...
Different jobs create different cycles of activities. For staff, like myself who work at a full time art college the last couple of weeks always feels like working on a till at Christmas and struggling to get the harvest in on time all rolled into one; lots of people needing your attention and too...
I first came across the group of artists and designers called Futurefarmers at a conference at the University of Montreal in 2001. They were there to talk about the development of one of their projects called They Rule. A blend of internet software wizardry and journalistic enquiry that allowed users to explore who sat...
Jacky Fleming’s illustrations and cartoons have regularly featured in The Guardian, Big Issue, New Statesman & Society and Independent on Sunday amongst many other publications, books of her cartoons published by Penguin and her work exhibited far and wide. She kindly agreed to an email interview for the We are OCA blog. Did you...
Puppetry and illustration might not have the most obvious connections but for Jereme Crow (who is currently undertaking OCA’s Illustration module) and for many other artists the links seem natural ones. They both explore visual narratives, storytelling and characterisation and often with a good deal of humour thrown in. Before Fluck and Law brought...
The designer Ken Garland published his first things first Manifesto in London in 1964 and with it he challenged a generation of visual communicators to rethink their role as designers and to do something more useful with their creative talents than simply create commercial advertising for cat food, stomach powder and aftershave lotion. In...
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