Liverpool Art & Design Academy (ADA)

Archive for the ‘Website’ Category

Two of the Royal College of Art’s most important collections have been made available to the general public through a new digitisation project which is accessible through the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS).

View the collections online at:

Royal College of Art Record of Student Work

Royal College of Art Collection

The Record of Student Work is a rare collection, containing over 30,000 slides of student work, which dates back to the 1960s and includes early work by notable College alumni including David Hockney, Tracey Emin, Ridley Scott and Thomas Heatherwick. A comprehensive and unique resource, it provides insight into the early creative processes of some of Britain’s best-known artists and designers, usually captured as they complete their postgraduate studies with installation shots from students’ degree shows.

The nature of the collection – comprised mainly of 35mm slides and usually locked in filing cabinets in the RCA library – has meant that many of these images have never been published. Now however, a three-year scanning project has resulted in over 5,000 of the most notable images from the collection being made publicly available for the first time.

The earliest slides (1960-1978) represent ad hoc attempts by individual departments to record their students’ work. Fashion and Textiles are especially well represented with images of the work of Ossie Clark and Zandra Rhodes among many others. However, from 1979, at the instigation of Christopher Frayling, then Professor of General Studies, Jan Murton, slide curator, and photographer Barry Marsden, the Royal College of Art degree show was comprehensively photographed and catalogued across all departments for the first time. The approach continues to this day, although slides were replaced with digital photography in 2003.

Notable alumni whose work is represented in this selection include: David Hockney, Zandra Rhodes, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Julien Macdonald, Philip Treacy, Orla Kiely, Harold Offeh and Thomas Heatherwick. These images are a representative sample of the entire collection 1960-2002 and all have been scanned from the original 35mm slides. Senior tutors from each department worked with the Special Collections Manager to identify key students’ work. Once a student was selected, every available slide of their work was digitised to provide a comprehensive picture of their work.

In addition to the Record of Student Work, over a thousand works from the Royal College of Art Collection of Paintings have been digitised and are also being made available through VADS. The Royal College of Art Collection is an invaluable resource of works that represent significant developments in British painting from the middle years of the 20th century to the present. The collection is made up of works donated by Painting graduates and staff. Examples include works by: Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, Paul Nash, John Piper, Frank Auerbach, John Minton, Peter Blake, David Hockney, Chris Ofili, Tracey Emin, Dinos Chapman and Sophie von Hellermann.

Dr Paul Thompson, Rector of the Royal College of Art said:

“These are indeed remarkable resources. Those selected from the Record of Student Work have been chosen not only for their subsequent eminence and reputation, but also for embodying particular trends, or producing especially idiosyncratic or revealing work. In both collections, the works have considerable research value and represent over half a century of work here at the RCA”

Neil Parkinson, Special Collections Manager added:

“The College believes in making the images available as widely as possible on a non-commercial basis for the purposes of learning, teaching and research. The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), which collates images from the HE sector for educational use, shares this aim, which makes them a natural partner for delivery of our image collections to the widest possible audience.”

Someplace : Something is a showcase of contemporary photography from around the world. No hierarchy, no categories, no rules.

Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comics often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters’ expense. With the last panel omitted, despair pervades all.

Find all the examples at http://3eanuts.com/

We now have an RSS feed!
A little late in the making but you can now see the latest postings without having to click on the site.
See the button in the right hand column.

JISC (a body which inspires UK colleges and universities in the innovative use of digital technologies) and Bristol’s Institute for Learning And Research Technology have created a free online Virtual Training Suite to advise Art and Design Students on the best ways to improve their Internet Research Skills.

The Internet for Art and Design will help you…

Learn how to make discerning use of the Internet to help find information for your coursework and assignments.

Great design inspiration resource in a beautifully simple website – bench.li collects together all things inspirational and even dumps them out as a screen saver for you.

LOOK11 is the new site to support the Liverpool International Photography Festival. The festival runs from May to June but you can get involved now – keep checking the site for ways of contributing, entering competitions and all the other info you’ll need about the event.

The theme for look11 is ‘A Call to Action?’ and focusing on all different aspects of social justice from the environment to community cohesion through to local policy and international conflict.

Anti-web messages via Empty the Web

Channel 4′s latest marketing campaign is a video version of fridge magnet poetry – Twist Our Words. You can create sentences using the predefined words which are joined together as video snippets of C4 celebrities saying them. The better ones will even be used on the telly…

Click for large version.

Secret Cloak is a understated blog in which…

Each day, a new visual theme explored. A hopefully interesting blog of resemblance and influence. An ocular wild goose chase.

It’s a side project of Frank Chimero, a designer/illustrator from Portland, USA, who scours the web to find content based around a new theme, set each day. Worth dipping into for some random inspiration!

Want to see what designs are currently being created across the world?
Well, Dribbble is the site that allows you to view samples of work from willing designers –

Dribbble is show and tell for designers, developers and other creatives. Share sneak peeks of your work as “shots” — small screenshots of the designs and applications you’re working on.

– great for inspiration and to showcase your wares!
(Link from DesignLiverpool Twitter – always see our sidebar for the latest feeds)

Courtesy of the Vatican – you can now visit and explore Michelangelo’s detailed artwork of the Sistine chapel – here.

Liverpool’s Bluecoat Gallery has launched it’s new website here.
Check it out to find out what’s happening with all aspects of life at the gallery/studios and other spaces.
Created by Local Design company Splinter.