New Blood

Paul Frost

Each year, at around this time, a fresh batch of graphic designers, photographers, illustrators and other creative types emerges young and dazed from arts colleges and universities across the land, and each year the D&AD New Blood show is there waiting for them. In a windowless, hangarlike space in Earls Court, New Blood gathers together the year’s crop, giving those brand new creatives a chance to display their work – and giving the nation’s ad agencies and design studios a chance to snap up raw talent before the competition does.

In an industry where freshness and novelty count above almost all else, New Blood is exactly what its name suggests: an infusion of ideas and ways of looking at the world. The thousands of lovingly crafted videos, pop-up books, posters, illustrations, web projects, portfolio books, animations, photographs and paintings on display have been created in relative isolation. Their makers haven’t yet been ground down by years of drinking in Hoxton bars, or experienced the cannibalistic whirlpool of the professional design world, where ideas and aesthetics that work are obsessively mimicked and reproduced, and the bottom line is always cash.

New Blood’s huge exhibition space is an exciting place to be: it throbs and hums with the nervous energy of those taking their first steps into the professional world. And everywhere you look, there’s the work. In these Photoshopped times, it’s not too complicated to produce polished images, and perhaps the craftsmanship of many of the pieces on show is no more than you’d expect from graduates. Still, there’s something oddly touching about these pieces: even when they’re responding to set advertising briefs, they have been sweated over, cherished and fretted about for much of the past year, and many of them come close to technical brilliance.

Take Paul Frost’s poster for an obsessive-compulsive disorder charity, for example. It’s a simple graphic slab featuring all the different motions of fastening a tie, repeated again, and again, and again before finally resulting in a tie – the concept is compelling, and the poster itself is immaculate.

Or Tom Slinger’s interactive project, Rogue, a highly personal piece of storytelling, in which the contents of a man’s bag are laid bare, allowing the viewer to piece together his life by flicking through his passport, reading the poems and shopping lists in his Moleskine, and watching a video crafted entirely from still photographs on his iPod. It’s a complex project, and Slinger makes it look easy – it’s so polished that it doesn’t even occur to you that it took months of graft and over 12,000 still photos to complete.

Or Chloe Inkpen’s gorgeously economic dog painting, sketched out in dark blue lines. The dog is cartoonish but its expression and posture are somehow utterly real: it peers over its shoulder with the expectation of a hound outside a newsagent. You almost expect it to flop to the floor to watch passers-by resignedly.

Or Zach McLaughlin’s illustrated book, Hairy and Scary, a vivid children’s tale written in rhyming couplets with more than a hint of Where the Wild Things Are about it – only the occasional pages that are sketched rather than being fully-finished watercolours indicate that what you’re holding isn’t in print already.

Possibly the most exhilarating thing about the exhibition is the absence of concrete trends: instead, there’s a glorious proliferation of styles, all jostling with one another for attention. Still, it’s the ideas that count, the ideas that keep those creatives coming hungrily back year after year, and the class of 2008 does not disappoint. The space fizzes with quirky, irreverent ways of viewing the world: there are David Adams’ beer mats that turn into mini rugby and football goalposts for peanut championships, or Scott Cruikshank’s clumsily-made but clever posters that twin religious imagery with big brands, so that an oil painting of Jesus ascending to heaven is cheekily twinned with the Red Bull logo, or David Jenkins’ clever minimalist Penguin covers, where the classic penguin logo is manipulated to fit the book’s title – The Three Musketeers cover has three penguins, The Invisible Man has none.

The ideas are everywhere: too many to count, and too many to view and digest. It’s enough to make the most hardened industry bod feel guilty – for every piece that you stop and take in, there’s another fifty hopefuls who you’ll pass by. Still, for all the guilt and exhaustion, New Blood is a thrilling glimpse of creativity now – and a window into what we’ll be imbibing in the adverts, magazines and visual culture of the next few years.

Alice Ross

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