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School of Design Innovation

The Whitecliffe School of Design Innovation offers programmes from Certificate to Degree level in Design and Digital Media.

You will explore the future of design and gain the knowledge and skills required to exist in the dynamic industry. You will be encouraged to take an innovative and leading-edge approach to create insightful and thought-provoking design outcomes.

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Go the extra mile, it will seriously pay off and it’s what separates you from everyone else! Georgia Johnstone, Design Innovation Graduate

School of Design Innovation Courses & Programmes

Design at Whitecliffe

"Design is being able to bring about change and awareness. As creatives, we can tend to sit on the periphery, which is actually a privilege as it means that we are able to see what’s going on in the world and create work that gives people insight into this. I believe that when we have the posture of wanting to bring about change and good to the world, we are able to create some beautiful and powerful things."

- Katie Paterson, BFA Graphic Design Graduate

Katie Paterson

What's on

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Alumni Spotlight: Georgia Johnstone

We caught up with BFA - Graphic Design Alumni Georgia Johnstone to talk about her time at Whitecliffe and life after graduating.

Story / School of design innovation
Toka tamihere

Best Design Finalist 2021 - Toka Tamihere

"The process for developing this typeface started with researching available Māori typefaces and contemplating what makes it Māori. Coming from a Māori cultural upbringing, it was easy to answer that Māori thrived on visual and oral language, only inheriting a written language with the cause of colonisation. Therefore, I challenged myself to create a typeface that would contain Māori visual language within a westernised context of type. The typeface is called Haehae, which is a Whakairo (Carving) design that is commonly used to surround other designs. So, my first steps towards designing this typeface was to research into handwritten protest signs, most of the inspiration revolving around Parihaka. Secondly, I investigated stencil type drawings seen on carvings, which inspired me to later form a typeface from the forms seen on a carved taniwha, hence the name Haehae. And so, coming to this form of style for my typeface, I decided to “take it back” to its original form of inspiration, therefore, carving the types most-current final design on to an mdf board."

16 Aug 2021 News / School of design innovation
Mitchell Clement Twelve Hamilton Houses3

Best Design Finalist 2021 - Mitchell Clement, Twelve Hamilton Houses

"Twelve Hamilton Houses explores the vernacular domestic typography of the twelve family houses that I lived in growing up in Hamilton, New Zealand. Documented via print, mainly the risograph stencil duplicator, local street signs and letterboxes are documented and extracted from images to put each house and suburb up for comparison. Alongside the vernacular typography, the book examines other methods of displaying residential street addresses through multiple “mapping lenses” such as online Streetview, written, oral / folklore and more “traditional” modes of documenting “place”."

16 Aug 2021 News / School of design innovation
Katie Paterson, 2023
Mitchell Clement, 2023
Maddie Chong, 2023
Amber McDonald, 2023

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