Designs on memories

Our six winners from the design competition had a fantastic time at the workshop with professional designer, Lynne Strachan of Curious Cranberry Designs on 22-23 October at Aberdeen College.

Kimberley Smith and Nick Breed from Meldrum Academy and Finlay Milne, Sam Murdoch, Duncan Henderson and Eilidh MacInnes from Turriff Academy swapped around and mixed up their initial prize-winning ideas to create 3 covers for the interview CDs which will eventually appear in the public and school libraries in Ellon, Turriff and Oldmeldrum.

We had such a great day; I was so impressed by the professional and sensible attitude of the pupils, and I think their teachers will be justly proud of them too when school starts again this Monday.

Here are some of my snapshots from the day - there are more on the main website.




Kim & Eilidh, though from different schools, made friends very quickly and were inspired by a book featuring old pictures of Turriff and Eilidh's cheeky smiley 'Turra Coo' from her original entry. here's what they came up with:


Nick and Finlay took things very seriously and designed to come up with a montage of Nick's excellent shots of Aberdeenshire farmland. Finlay then told me a story about why the seagulls follow tractors and combine harvesters. He said they were feasting on all the mice and rats killed by the farm machinery! Eeww! Thinking of Robert Burns' famous poem of the 'wee sleekit, coorin', timorous beastie' I suggested he should draw a mouse and a combine behind it to represent the wildlife and the farmyard, so that's how we came up with the drawings of the mice and the combine on the back of their design for Ellon. Here are the boys hard at work and their final design.

Expert tuition from Lynne!

Sam and Duncan decided to go totally abstract for Meldrum's design:




A riot of colour and inovation! Sam particularly enjoyed creating her orange bird which appears on both the front and back. Duncan created the cool trees and leaf patterns.

Three fantastic designs and six happy bairns!

The designs will be going to the Turriff Printing Services later in the winter once we've collected all our interviews. The were will be a display of the designs and the earlier entries at Woodhill House, Aberdeenshire Council's Aberdeen HQ soon. More to come on that.


I also hope to feature clips on the podcast channel of the interviews that took place with the pupils during the workshop.