Poster Competition

This year’s National Student Survey (NSS) poster competition offers students the chance to showcase their work and spend time working  with design professionals. Prizes are

1. National recognition as the winning poster is used to advertise the NSS across every university in the country and is targeted at the over 300,000 students eligible to complete the survey.
2. A day working with the firm responsible for running the NSS, Ipsos MORI, to further develop and adapt the poster, getting it ready for use in the promotional campaign.
3. A one week, expenses-paid work placement with leading London design firm Hat-Trick.

The competition is open to all current students at a higher education or further education institution.

Completed designs (three allowed) , along with a completed submission form must be received here by 5 October 2012 by Midnight. Full details about the competition including the design brief on this page

Entries will be judged by a panel of representatives from NUS, HEFCE, HEFCW, and Ipsos MORI. The winning entrant will be notified by 29 October 2012. Last years winners

Maurice Sendak

"Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday". This statement opens a very full article about Sendak  and his work  published in the New York Times . It goes on "Roundly praised, intermittently censored and occasionally eaten, Mr. Sendak’s books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children. He was known in particular for more than a dozen picture books he wrote and illustrated himself, most famously “Where the Wild Things Are,” which was simultaneously genre-breaking and career-making when it was published by Harper & Row in 1963".

“Dear Mr. Sendak,” read a letter to Sendak  from an 8-year-old boy. “How much does it cost to get to where the wild things are? If it is not expensive, my sister and I would like to spend the summer there.”

Sendak’s work was the subject of critical studies and major exhibitions; in the second half of his career, he was also renowned as a designer of theatrical sets. He also illustrated other authors, including Hans Christian Andersen, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, William Blake and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

His last story was about an orphaned pig who had never had a birthday party.

Thousands of high quality freely available images from a Baltimore Museum

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland is internationally renowned for its collection of art . It offers an overview of world art from pre-dynastic Egypt to 20th-century Europe, and counts among its many treasures Greek sculpture and Roman sarcophagi; medieval ivories and Old Master paintings; Art Deco jewelry and 19th-century European and American masterpieces.

In 2011, the Walters launched a redesigned works of art website with 10,000 online artwork images freely licensed under a Creative Commons license.

 Apart from their image rich website,  works of art from this museum have been donated as  19,000 + freely-licensed images  to WikimediaCommons. This is one of the largest and most comprehensive such releases made by any museum.

The images and their associated information join the collection of more than 12 million freely usable media files, which make up the image repository for Wikipedia.

The image donation is part of the Walters Museum’s larger initiative to provide free public access to its collection, both online and offline, beginning with the removal of admission fees in 2006.

Worth Global Style Network

Cardiff Met Library has a new and exciting electronic resource. It is called Worth Global Style Network, the resource that predicts and tracks new trends in fashion, textiles and related areas such as youth culture, marketing, branding and packaging. Rich in images both still and moving, you can view worldwide catwalk shows, see what’s in the high street shops right now or read what fabrics are likely to be appearing in two year’s time. Special features, news items and trend forecasting for colour, fashion and materials make this resource valuable for fashion, and textiles students but also definitely of potential interest for media studies students,  illustrators, graphic designers, product designers, interior designers and anyone interested in fashion and textiles and their world of image and fantasy, theatricality and display, invention and style. Available only to Cardiff Met staff and students it is part of the Electronic Library. Here is a link to it. Help and advice on this and all our other databases and resources available at Llandaff Library from Catherine Drake and at Howard Gardens Library from Jenny Godfrey.

Check out another fashion database we have for a month's trial until the end of May. It is called The Vogue Archive and comprises all the pages of all the American Vogue US edition from 1892-present as a  fully searchable database. Let Catherine or myself know what you think of it. Here is the link. Again this will only work for logged in staff and students of Cardiff Met.