scarborough seems to be challenging preconceptions a lot these days. as with last summer one of the open-top buses that rund between the two bays bears the legend ’scarborough - a university town’. ‘the university of scarborough?’ i hear you cry, ‘we haven’t heard of that one’. well before you start looking it up in the league tables it’s actually the university of hull (who do very well in the league tables) who have a campus in scarborough. it’s home to many of their arts, computing, business and coastal studies courses and has a beautiful location on filey road, not far from the clock tower end of the south cliff esplanade.

there are lots of interesting facts about scarborough campus - it’s the uk mainland’s first fully wifi’d campus, craig gaskill is the uk’s youngest dean and it was here that the uk’s first centre for internet computing was founded. i was invited to be a visiting lecturer on the digital arts course between 2004-6 which i enjoyed very much - the vibe on campus is great (have a look at their on the edge series).

at the start of this university year several of the courses in the faculty of arts combined with the centre for internet computing to form a new school - the school of arts and new media. it will be fascinating to see the work that comes out of this flux where computer scientists and perfomers collaborate on projects.

we were comissioned to develop a visual identity for the school. above are the first fruits if this - an A6 flyer printed with a high gloss varnish. there wasn’t time to source new images but the university provided photos taken from student projects and performances over the last couple of years. we liked the idea of an identity which pushed these often disparate images together in various configurations with a constant typography holding it together. we chose rich colours to try and get a feel of an immersive environment. some of the images were only lowish resolution but we deliberately used them to let the pixels show - usually a cardinal sin but it seemed highly appropriate given the subject matter.

we’ve since produced some banner stands on the same theme. it would be great to animate this identity - i can picture the column images sliding against each other and constantly changing - in web media you could let the user choose which images worked together and thus customise the identity to their liking.