Ellie Bainbridge (She/Her)
Winner
The Kerry Aylin Prize for Distinction in Printing
Glasgow/Liverpool based graphic designer interested in all things type and printing. My practice this year has mainly explored themes of nostalgia, with a focus on world-building and typeface design. I most enjoy utilising traditional graphic design skills and tend to use wit and narrative to communicate my ideas.
Flourish
Shuggie Bain is a Man Booker Prize winning novel written by Douglas Stuart. The novel centers around Shuggie Bain, an effeminate boy who spends his 1980s childhood in poverty stricken Glasgow. The project was was commissioned by Picador to mark the publication of the novel in paperback with the intended outcome of a mural at the Barrowland Ballroom and posters around Glasgow, with a 6-sheet poster to run down Sauchiehall Street. Cobolt Collective were selected for the project and Jack Batchelor, a fellow Communication Design student, and I were brought on to produce the typeface to be used in the designs. With a 2-week turn around, we immediately began to research and found key phrases in the book that would inform our ideas. Throughout the book, Shuggie is referred to as being ‘no right’, a feminine presence in a very masculine world. After coming across the word ‘flourish’ in one of the our quotes from the book, we decided on the concept. The idea was to create a typeface that presents the concept of toxic masculinity and juxtapose it with the addition of flourishes, demonstrating the idea of something being ‘no right’. The flourishes enhanced the letterforms whilst also harking back to the idea of dance and movement, a common theme throughout the book.
Huddleston
This project was inspired by the talk ‘To All The Fonts I’ve Loved Before’ by Eric Hu. I decided to look back to my family history and create a typeface dedicated to my Grandad and his old fishmongers. The initial stages of this project were sentimental as I allowed myself to indulge in my childhood memories of both the shop and my Grandad. Collecting photographs and speaking to my mum about her memories proved to be emotional and encouraged me to produce a typeface that respected our combined memories, using the shopfront as a starting point. The type specimen borrows its visual language from the shop itself, including images of my family and pairing them with words and phrases relating to my memories, as well as including a poem written by my Grandmother.