ISTD 2026 info for prospective students!

Coming back in 2026 to Toi Rauwhārangi / College of Creative Arts for an honours year? Want to get deep into typography? This is the course — 197434 Design Awards and Competitions — is for you!  

You’ve probably been directed here as you took Editorial Design in 2025. Editorial Designers quite often take a higher level typography course for their elective in honours semester 1 (if you’re coming back) so this page shares some info about that option. And also to introduce myself and say hi! I’m Jo, and I coordinate and teach this course.

The course is 197434 Design Awards and Competitions, and the typography option (select S1B1 when enrolling) follows a brief from the ISTD: International Society for Typographic Designers. This is a prestigious organisation committed to raising the bar and inspiring a love for all forms of typography, and students whose work gets accepted by ISTD can use the letters MISTD after their name. This is a fantastic ‘quality assurance’ accreditation to have when you enter the job market.

In this course, you’ll use the ISTD brief as a starting point to develop an expressive typography-focussed output (usually a book but it can also be digital or spatial).

The briefs have just been released here: istd.org.uk/sas and we will likely do option 3: Power.

It’s a great opportunity to go deep with typographic skill, narrative design, craft, and make a stand-out portfolio object. This year, we submitted five projects to ISTD and they all got accreditation at Merit or Commendation standard! A huge deal! Have a look at those projects below or in this PDF.

Congratulations to Yana, Ruby, Martin, Micah and Emilia :-) 

If you have any questions at all, email me and we can tee up a zoom chat. Have a great break! 

PS, the five project books will be returned to me soon—if you'd like to see them, please drop me a line. Perhaps we can have a show-and-tell in the new year.