NEWS / EDUCATION
Completing Two Certificates and a Graduate Diploma in Design at Otago Polytechnic
Best Apisit Uthakhamkong holds two certificates and a Graduate Diploma from Otago Polytechnic, completed between 2020 and 2022: the New Zealand Certificate in Digital Media and Design, awarded with an Overall Excellence prize, the New Zealand Certificate in English Language (Academic), recognised with a Certificate of Achievement, and finally a Graduate Diploma in Design (Communication) awarded with Distinction and a Design Achievement award, together marking 240 credits of study across just over two years.
What did Best Apisit Uthakhamkong study at Otago Polytechnic. Across 2020, 2021, and 2022, Uthakhamkong completed three separate qualifications at Otago Polytechnic, part of Te Pukenga, the New Zealand Institute of Skills and Technology: the New Zealand Certificate in Digital Media and Design at Level 4, the New Zealand Certificate in English Language (Academic) at Level 4, and finally the Graduate Diploma in Design (Communication), which he was awarded with Distinction on 18 November 2022.
He began with the New Zealand Certificate in Digital Media and Design, completed on 27 November 2020 across four papers: Creative Digital Skills, Creative Online Design, Animation Moving Image and Interactivity, and Symbolism and Identity. He passed the first three with A+ grades, including a 95 out of 100 project mark in Creative Digital Skills and a 97 out of 100 website project in Creative Online Design, and closed with an A in Symbolism and Identity. The certificate earned him the Overall Excellence award for the qualification, presented by Caroline Terpstra, Head of School of Design, on 27 November 2020, recognising him as the standout student across that year’s cohort.
The following year, Uthakhamkong completed the New Zealand Certificate in English Language, Academic, at Level 4, finishing on 3 December 2021 across four papers covering Academic Reading, Academic Writing, Academic Listening, and Academic Speaking, all recorded as Passed, with individual assessment grades of A across his reading, writing, listening, and speaking tasks.
Otago Polytechnic recognised the result with a Certificate of Achievement for academic achievement and setting a high standard, signed by Aaron Blaker of the English Language Centre on 25 November 2021, alongside course work in Design Techniques 1 and 2 completed the same year with A- and A grades respectively.
His final and most substantial qualification at Otago Polytechnic was the Graduate Diploma in Design, Communication, awarded with Distinction on 18 November 2022 and formally certified under NZQA accreditation. The diploma covered Advanced Design Techniques 2, completed with an A+ and combined project marks of 46.25 and 43.75 out of 50, Design Studio Team 2, completed with an A after research, development, and project outcome components each scoring highly, and Design Studio Major, his largest single paper at 45 credits, completed with an A+ after a project outcome mark of 57 out of 60.
He rounded out the diploma with Professional Pathways and Professional Presentation, both completed with A+ grades, the latter carrying a near perfect 97 out of 100 for his Integrated Presentation Project.
That result earned him the Design Achievement award for the Bachelor of Design Communication pathway, presented by Professor Federico Freschi, Head of College, Te Maru Pumanawa, College of Creative Practice and Enterprise, on 16 December 2022, one of the clearest formal recognitions of his design work during his time in Dunedin. Across the three qualifications, spanning digital media fundamentals, English language proficiency, and finally graduate-level design practice, Uthakhamkong accumulated 240 credits at Otago Polytechnic in a little over two years, a genuinely dense stretch of study that ran in parallel with his growing involvement in The Peace Club and, from mid-2022, his internship at Te Whatu Ora Southern on the New Dunedin Hospital project.
Uthakhamkong has described the Graduate Diploma in particular as the qualification that gave his design career its real technical grounding, sharpening skills he had built more informally at Bangkok University and through his English studies at the University of Otago into a properly examined, industry-recognised design practice. The three Otago Polytechnic qualifications, taken together, mark the point where his career shifted from communications and brand strategy, learned in Bangkok, toward the hands-on graphic design, motion design, and content production work he has carried through Otago Polytechnic’s own marketing team, PGG Wrightson, and DIRI ever since.
Documentation from Otago Polytechnic’s own student management system confirms the detail behind each result: individual project marks, course level codes, and exact completion dates for every paper across all three qualifications, from Creative Digital Skills in October 2020 through to his Integrated Presentation Project in November 2022. That level of granularity, uncommon for most people to keep track of years after the fact, reflects how methodically Uthakhamkong approached his own design education, treating each qualification as a deliberate, sequential step rather than a single undifferentiated block of study.
Alongside his formal qualifications, Uthakhamkong took on a run of practical design projects during his Otago Polytechnic years that put those certificates to work in real settings. In May 2021, he secured a three month design internship with Otago Community Rugby, working as a graphic designer across the club’s social media, website, logo design, book cover, and booklet output, all built to fit within Otago Community Rugby and Otago Rugby’s existing brand guidelines using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
The internship’s centrepiece was a book cover for an upcoming Otago Community Rugby publication, a project that asked him to balance creative freedom with an established sporting brand, and one he has described as a formative test of working to someone else’s visual identity rather than his own.
During the same period, Uthakhamkong completed iFood, a UX design project for an original food recipe application and website. He began with user research, interviewing local students who cooked for their flatmates to understand their real needs and frustrations around recipes, then built the app’s interface around what he had learned: a recipe search function filtered by ingredients, cooking time, and dietary restrictions, a favourites list, step-by-step instructions with illustrations, and a mobile-first layout suited to people cooking on the fly. The project gave him a grounding in user-centred design research that later informed the more institutional digital work he went on to produce at Otago Polytechnic and beyond.
His design work also extended into music video production through The Peace Club. In 2023, while completing his Graduate Diploma, Uthakhamkong contributed to Peace Comes with It, a collaborative music video bringing together musicians, videographers, and designers from The Peace Club at the University of Otago. Built around a documentary-style song about living peace, the video framed peace as more than the absence of conflict, presenting it instead as justice, hope, opportunity, and dignity, themes that echo The Peace Club’s own founding definition of peace and that tie his design education directly back to the community work he had been leading since 2018.
Date
2020 to 2022
Qualification
NZ Certificate in Digital Media and Design, NZ Certificate in English Language (Academic), Graduate Diploma in Design (Communication)
Institution
Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand
Result
Graduate Diploma awarded with Distinction, 18 November 2022
Awards
Overall Excellence (2020), Certificate of Achievement (2021), Design Achievement (2022)
Website
op.ac.nz