A couple of months ago an adland friend, Tim Maguire, forwarded me an e-mail from Glasgow Caledonian University. Every year he is invited to talk to the second year students who are studying for their B.A. (Hons) Media and communication degree, about a career in advertising, or warn them off it perhaps (did you know that in the last 20 years Scotland has lost 80% of its clients?).
This time however the head of the course was looking for someone to teach the 3rd year students the Creative Advertising Module, a 12-week course squashed into 12 Fridays. (12 very full Fridays). And since I’ve spent the last 15 years as a C.D. teaching student placements the best way to learn about being creative (and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it) I volunteered to run the course.
So here we are, heading for week 10 and it seems to be going very well. Ian Mowatt, head of the Media and communications course has been fantastically supportive and allowed me to re- structure the module so that it is bang up to date with the industry today. And every week I’ve set the 70 students a creative brief, which they have one week to answer. I have to say I’m very pleased with the results. Considering that this is not a creative advertising degree, quite a number of the students have potential careers in the creative departments of Ad agencies or digital agencies. Though not in Scotland I suspect, if the client exodus continues.
I’ll stick up some of the best ideas at the end of the course and you can judge them for yourself

Like this: Clean; simple; clever; make every word count.
Invading: tick. Resistance: tick. Job done.
Poster as Art.

Whilst doing research on a project I happened upon a whole load of Kennedy election posters. The weird thing is they all used a similar graphic device, a circle around his head.
Is it me or do they all look like he’s seen through the sight of a rifle?

I was born in Dorset but at the age of five moved to Durham, in the north east of England.
And despite living in Scotland for twenty years, whenever I say I’m going home for the weekend, I mean to Durham.
It’s a stunning city, which most people will never have visited. But they may well have admired it from the train window as they whizzed past on route to Edinburgh or London, because the line runs past the city’s finest feature, It’s towering cathedral. (Described by many as the greatest Norman building in Europe,actually).
And last week it looked even more amazing. Because the whole city became the stage for ‘Lumiere’, a collaboration between 60 light-and-sound artists, staged as part of Durham's bid for UK culture capital in 2013.
The highlight, for many, was the phenomenal lighting up of the cathedral, with imagery of pages taken from the 7th-century Lindisfarne Gospels. The work was by projection artist Ross Ashton.
Thanks Ross for putting the spotlight on my home city.
(An not ‘town’ As Roger Whittaker insisted on calling it, in his god awful song.)