A mural wrapped arund a street corner with the words "Love Them?" written in white text with red shadow on a blue background on one side and "Tell Them." written in write text with a blue shadow ad red background on the other.

The first ‘In Conversation with Alumni’ talk of the new year was with BA Graphic & Media Design alumnus and Winner of ‘Street Artist of the Year‘ at the Rise Art Awards, 2018, Naomi Edmondson. Naomi talked through her project Survival Techniques, and the distinctive typographic style that she has developed for putting positive messages into public spaces. We last featured Naomi’s work on this blog in 2017 (https://gmdlcc.co.uk/2017/10/03/survival-techniques-exhibition/) and the Survival Techniques project has since gone from strength to strength, with commissions as far afield as Tokyo.

Naomi talked about the challenges of painting on different surfaces and at a variety of sites and scales, also translating the work through to print outcomes etc.

A key piece of advice she had for students was, “make it easy for people to say ‘yes'” and so far that seems to be working well for Naomi as a Survival Technique.

A mural wrapped arund a street corner with the words "Love Them?" written in white text with red shadow on a blue background on one side and "Tell Them." written in write text with a blue shadow ad red background on the other.