Black Square has a great relationship with the Durban branch of Vega. We visit a couple of times each year with the multimedia students to see what they have planned and give feedback. Those sessions are always hugely interesting – the students have great ideas, and the lecturers are good at getting them to articulate those ideas.  At the annual showcase, Black Square gives an award to the student whose work we find most promising and exciting. The 2010 Showcase was held on Friday 3rd December, and it was a great night.

We saw 2 online portfolios that worked really well for us:

When we sat in on a presentation session in August this year, Rowan Foxcroft wanted to start selling his t-shirt designs online. In the short few months since then, he’s produced the shirts, marketed them at events and built a WordPress site to sell them. We like the design of the site, and it’s remarkable that he’s been able to balance the various aspects of this project so well.

We were also very impressed by Pete Reynold’s portfolio, and his online zine. It was definitely a big advantage that he’d put his portfolio online – it made a huge difference to our judging of the work. Pete’s portfolio was a lot easier to navigate than most others – the work stood out, not just the design of the portfolio. Plus, his work is really good – our friends over at Disturbance design have featured his work on their Daily.

In addition to building his portfolio site, Pete has used a simple WordPress theme to back his hardcore zine – for the kids, by the kids – called RISE. RISE made a big difference to our decision because it focuses on content, not just design or Flash coding or animation.

Both Rowan and Pete had managed to move beyond their portfolios and into the real world. For us this makes a huge difference: We really don’t like designers who just make the pretty pictures on their Macs and don’t see the bigger picture. Designers who understand how the pretty pictures fit in with the marketing strategy, the copywriting – and the coding if you’re building a website – are much more valuable. It was tough to choose between these two creative and talented guys, but in the end we gave Pete the Black Square Award for his efforts – a copy of Alan Fletcher’s “The art of looking sideways”.

The awards evening was also the opening of the new Vega Durban Campus. It’s a great-looking campus with some exciting facilities – hopefully next year will see us even more involved in the students’ work.