2019 graduates win industry acclaim
from Design Week and The Drum

Recent graduates Rory Stiff and Casey Highfield have won awards from Design Week and The Drum for their unbiased election newspaper Politics v Policies.

08 Jul 2020

Recent graduates Rory Stiff and Casey Highfield have won awards from Design Week and The Drum for their unbiased election newspaper Politics v Policies.

The two designers created the publication to provide readers with fair and objective coverage of the six main parties’ policies in the run-up to the UK’s 2019 General Election.

Rory and Casey graduated from the BA (Hons) Graphic Design course at UCA Epsom in 2019. Believing that newspapers and social media were often offering one-sided election coverage, the agency created Politics v Policies - a 16-page tabloid-format newspaper that aimed to meet voters' need for objective information, setting out to educate its readers rather than to influence the public vote. 

They then distributed 10,000 copies in London on the day before voters went to the polls.

Their project won the category for best Editorial Design in both The Drum Design Awards 2020 and the Design Week Awards 2020.

Rory and Casey learning their project won The Drum Awards 2020

“As new graduates in the field, it feels great to have our work a recognised alongside projects from some of the top studios in the world,” said Rory. “We didn't have a big budget, a global client, or a lot of time — we put the whole project together in two weeks — but I think this proves that if you’ve got a good idea and the guts to go for it, you can be rewarded."

The Design Week judges said: "This self-initiated project compared policies side-by-side in an objective way. The clear, no-nonsense design, presented as a newspaper, was the perfect medium for the project."

Rory and Casey continue balancing their busy freelance schedules with full-time jobs at the creative agency 20something, but they’ve still found the time for a follow-up project; a website called Good Book, which helps people to find and donate to charities that are doing vital work in response to Covid-19 but are critically underfunded.

To learn more about studying Graphic Design at UCA, visit our course pages.