D&AD Awards 2020

Yesterday evening it was the D&AD awards, which this year, was an online affair. I've been fortunate to have been invited to the awards dinner a few times over the years and been on the table of those who have won yellow pencils for projects for which I've had input and they have been very memorable evenings!

Given the circumstances, the awards this year were very well executed and superbly presented by D&AD President Kate Stanners Saatchi & Saatchi Global CCO).

A phenomenal 618 pencils were awarded, including 384 Wood, 150 Graphite, 68 Yellow, and 4 elusive Black Pencils. One of the black pencils worthy of note was for typeface Universal Sans, a variable typeface that allows for an extensive range of customisation and unique variations produced by Family Type.

This year, many of the studios that I have worked with over the years, including Johnson Banks, NB Studio, Magpie, Osborne Ross and Here Design, to name but a few, have been nominated and won awards.

It's always lovely to have been involved with a project which has won an award and even better, a project which has won two awards...

Twenty-five Sculptures In Five Dimensions was a self-promotional project for writer Tom Sharp. It was a demonstration of creativity within strict technical writing and design restraints, an experiment in reading and seeing, and an attempt at creating a sublime, meaningful experience with as few elements as possible.

I wrote about the actual event on my blog, last November  HERE.

Tom Sharp filled a high-ceilinged church in Covent Garden with 25 plinths. Each plinth held a text created to a strict format of five syllables per line, five lines plus a title. Each piece of writing described an original, imaginary object, so that any emotional response the reader had was because of the object they conjured up, rather than language manipulation.

The project was a collaboration with Studio Sutherl&. Tom Sharp and Jim Sutherland are the Creative Directors, writer is Tom Sharp and the designer is Rosey Trickett. The printed sheets were all printed on our wonderful Sixties paper and printed offset litho by Boss Print.

Yesterday evening this project was awarded a Graphite Pencil [Graphic Design] for Self Promotion and a Yellow Pencil [Graphic Design] for Writing for Graphic Design.

Congratulations to all participants in this year's awards. It has been a strange year, but life goes on and it's great to see that the creative industry is still producing and recognising great work, even in these unprecedented times.

You can watch the 2020 D&AD awards and check out the winners HERE

https://www.thepoetryofitall.com/
http://studio-sutherland.co.uk/
https://www.bossprint.com/

Posted by Justin Hobson 11.09.2020