Students Personalise New Meetings Rooms with Illustrations

First and second year illustration students have been working on a live project in partnership with Hastings Borough Council to give their newly refurbished meeting rooms some character.

The council wanted to inject some life into their new rooms at Muriel Matters House and asked local degree students to come up with illustrations of historic personalities from Hastings.

FdA Illustration and Graphic Design students at Sussex Coast College Hastings designed a range of images of famous people from Hastings’ past, including inventor of the first working television, John Logie Baird; Civil Engineer, Thomas Brassey; computer scientist, Alan Turing; social novelist Robert Tressel, and founder of the London School of Medicine for Women, Sophia Jex-Blake.

21 students worked on design ideas, put together CVs, wrote rationales for their proposals and then produced visual thumbnails and roughs. They then presented their ideas to members of the council to approve their work.

Second year student, Amy Cobb, was given the brief to design an illustration of Sophia Jex-Blake and said that the experience was a lot of fun to work on, and also very educational.

Amy said: “It was a fantastic opportunity for us to work on a real live brief, with a real client. The whole process was very professional, and gave us a good insight into what working as an illustrator will be like.

I had a lot of fun researching and designing the image of Sophia Jex-Blake. I also learnt so much about the amazing strides she made in the field of medicine and being the founder of the London School of Medicine.”

Joanna Kerr, Illustration Subject Leader said: “It was a really attractive live project for the students to undertake as the council were clear from the outset that they would brief students and then ask them to present their work in a way that they would if they were working on this as a commercial project.

The students’ illustrations were an excellent representation of each character, and they all responded very professionally to the brief.”

The illustrations were printed and installed in 10 of the newly refurbished rooms by Ricochet Printers.