Honorary president: Judith Butcher Honorary vice-president: David Crystal OBE

SfEP conference design competition winner

With a substantial majority of the votes, Haydn Cooper's designs have won the competition to create a design to go on the SfEP Oxford conference folder and other memorabilia. Haydn wins a free day's (residential) place at the conference.

Here Haydn introduces himself and explains what inspired his design:

My name is Haydn Cooper and I am the editorial and design manager at the International Baccalaureate, a non-profit educational organization and a corporate associate of the SfEP. We have an in-house publishing team and find the SfEP database invaluable for recruiting freelance editors and proofreaders.

I was a graphic designer for about ten years before landing the job of managing the editorial department. Nowadays I employ other designers to work on our books, but I still like to do freelance design work to keep my eye in.

Originally from the Midlands, I trained in graphic design in Birmingham and worked for a while in educational marketing. I now live in Cardiff and work in educational publishing, which I find thoroughly rewarding.

This competition was fun to enter. I wanted to incorporate the theme of looking back, without giving the impression of being stuck in the past. To create an overall sense of progression and movement, I used the metaphor of zooming traffic on a motorway. The cars travel in opposite directions but don't hold each other back. So then I looked for suitable photographic images that had impact and a nice composition.

The idea of white headlights and red tail lights fitted neatly with the brief to design in two colours, and I used SfEP red to colour the tail lights. The snaking road was an interesting shape that I thought would work well at different sizes, but I removed the details so that it could be reproduced as a simple shape on merchandise.

I enjoyed designing this. Thanks to those who voted and I hope you enjoy using the final result.

Haydn's Entry
Click on the images to see larger versions.
Folder	Memorabilia