Nicola Crabb with her winning trohy design prototype

A student from Plymouth College of Art has won a competition to design the award that will be presented to the winners at the 2011 Media & Innovation Awards.

The awards are run in association with Creative Industries iNet (Innovation Network).

Nicola Crabb, 27, from Dartmouth, designed the award as part of her degree. She is in her second year at Plymouth College of Art, studying Applied Arts.

Nicola’s work focuses on glass and ceramics and the award is made of glass and has a smooth sided flat base that will bear the name of the awards and the category. Sitting on top of the base is a glass ball featuring a wormhole, with orange and yellow streaked through the glass.

Nicola said about her winning design: “There were number of different elements that inspired my design for the Media & Innovation Award. The outer pattern was inspired by my experimental work on a design program on the computer, which was a brand new and innovative way of drawing for me. The inner detail was the idea of a ‘wormhole’ in space where one could travel through time from A to B. My thoughts were that the winner would be given an award to represent their achievements, and the ‘wormhole’ represents the journey they took to get there.”
Nicola’s ambition is to “become a teacher for children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder and Communication Difficulties, however, my time spent at the college has re-kindled my passion for the arts and my hope for the future is that I’ll find a path to combine the two.”

The winning design will be presented to winners at the Media & Innovation Awards, which will be held on the 9th of June 2011.

Karen Stockdale, from the Media & Innovation Awards said: “We were incredibly impressed by the quality and variety of submissions that we had from the students. Nicola’s design reflects the brand really well and her approach showed innovative thinking.”

The 2011 Media & Innovation Awards are funded by the Creative Industries iNet, a programme of support designed to help the South West’s creative businesses thrive and advance the area’s growing reputation as a global creative centre of excellence. The Creative industries iNet is a part of the Government’s Solutions for Business portfolio, funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and led by South West Screen.