Shortlisted creative work selected at the D&AD 2023 awards
Intro
In May I attended the D&AD festival. D&AD or Design and Art Direction, formerly known as British Design and Art Direction, is a British educational organisation that was created in 1962 to stimulate, enable and award creative excellence in design and advertising. Considered by many the world’s most prestigious benchmark for commercial creativity.
What Making it is Made Of
Making it takes a lot.
It takes the ‘best brief ever’ and wide-eyed naivety.
It takes indecision that becomes obsession.
It takes thinking, rethinking, tearing it up, and making it fit.
It takes working through the bad to achieve the brilliant, and the character to see it through.
It takes hours and hours.
Tabs on tabs.
Crafting pixels and paragraphs to perfection.
It takes a village.
A lot goes into making it.
But once you’ve made it, everything changes.
For you, your clients, our industry — everyone.D&AD Awards 2023.
The awards
Each year, the D&AD Awards gather the world’s best creative work from across the commercial design, advertising, production and craft disciplines to be judged by more than 330 global creative leaders, practitioners and innovators.
Their categories span the full spectrum of disciplines, from commerce to digital; graphic design to book design; art direction to writing; entertainment to gaming & virtual worlds; impact, collaborative and side hustle; and much more.
3 pieces of shortlisted creative work
The following 3 pieces got my interest and sparked some curiosity at the festival as their approach stood out due to their cheekiness, playfulness and boldness / rebelliousness.
1. In the category Branding and Packaging Design: The Hornicultural Society
Relate, a charity providing relationship support throughout the UK, and Ogilvy UK, one of the largest and most influential fully-integrated communications groups in the UK, unveiled a gardening centre campaign that celebrates the UK’s two favourite passions, during National Gardening Week, as PHE (Public Health Emergency) research reveals STIs among the over 65s is at an all-time high.
The campaign features a series of vegetable-themed condom packet designs, looking much like vegetable seeds, which will be displayed in garden centres. With a nod to the most popular cheeky vegetable emojis, the range features aubergines, plums, courgettes, onions and avocados — forming a fully sustainable condom collection that can even be planted in a pot to biodegrade. They also created bespoke typography to give each seed packet its own personality with cheeky characteristics built into the letters. The playful, vegan, tongue-in-cheek illustrated condoms were showcased at the family-run garden centre Finchley Nurseries.
By bringing the sexual health debate to an unexpected environment like a garden centre, the campaign will help break down taboos and get people talking about later life sex. The billboards feature close-up shots of suggestive vegetable seed packets under the banner of ‘The Hornicultural Society’.
2. In the category Branding and Packaging Design: Leibniz Global Relaunch
The original Leibniz biscuit has a simple and distinctive design, fifty-two “teeth” frame the rectangular field on which the logo is imprinted in capital letters. This was Hermann Bahlsen’s original 1891 design. The biscuit has been featured in a series of “Monuments of German Design”. And this was exactly the starting point of the relaunch, the strength of a shape that manages to embody all the necessary information on the product by itself, the ultimate hero product. Regarding the new Brand logo and typography, Auge Design agency, decided to keep the original rounded style and “baked” it exactly the way biscuits are, therefore the logo has smooth ink traps that remind of the dough when it swells.
Watch the relaunch video here
3. In the category Digital brand: Hack market
Tech giants product 2.82 billion new devices every year, emitting 800 million tons of CO2. Back Market sells high tech but with low impact. Their refurbished devices are 91% less polluting.
Hack Market is a campaign, created by Marcel agency, promoting the sustainability benefits of refurbished tech, developed for BackMarket, Europe’s leading marketplace for refurbished tech.
For Earth Day BackMarket hijacked the “temple of new tech”: Apple Stores. A hijacking of the purchase journey designed to make tech buyers pay attention to cold hard facts about sustainability right when they were about to buy a brand new device. Using Apple’s own AirDrop technology and devices to advertise its messages for a greener alternative.
This original in-store activation was amplified using influencers and video content. See below the video.
Sources:
https://www.ogilvy.com/uk/work/hornicultural-society
https://www.dandad.org/awards/professional/2023/237145/the-hornicultural-society
https://www.dandad.org/awards/professional/2023/237022/leibniz-global-relaunch
https://auge-design.com/work/leibniz-design-relaunch
https://www.dandad.org/awards/professional/2023/237723/hack-market