D&AD Blog

D&AD Student Awards workshops at the BBC

We've got a couple of workshops and a round table event for tutors coming up at the BBC over the next few weeks.

You must RSVP to studentawards@dandad.co.uk for all events. The BBC cannot admit visitors who have not previously registered for this event. 

Let us know which day you would like to attend as well as your name, college and phone number.

 

Thursday 19 November & Tuesday 24 November - London

Thursday 19: 1.30pm – 6pm

Location: Broadcast Centre, 201 Wood Lane, Media Village, London, W12 7TP

Nearest tube station: White City

 

D&AD, along with our invited speakers from both the sponsoring client and industry representative,  will be looking at a range of advertising and craft briefs from this year’s Student Awards. This half-day session will focus on Advertising, Animation and Social Design.

The talk is designed to entice entrants to explore radical thinking and will elaborate on how design narratives can and should educate people.

 

Tuesday 24: 9.30am – 4pm

Location: BBC Broadcasting House - Portland Place, London, W1A 1AA

Nearest tube station: Oxford Circus

This full-day session will focus on the digital briefs. The theme of the discussions will be around Online Advertising, Viral and Integrated Communication. We will examine the issues of collaboration and how the traditional mediums are adapting to recent changes.

In the afternoon following the talks we are hosting a roundtable discussion on digital media for tutors and industry.

The workshops will be filmed and posted on our website so all students can benefit from them in developing their responses.

To RSVP for either workshop and the tutor session please email studentawards@dandad.co.uk

Click here to see the BBC brief:

http://studentawards.dandad.org/2010/html/bbc_27.html

creativesear.ch team wins 30-day challenge

Congratulations to Beckmans College of Design students, Petter Prinz & Kaspar Prinz, who have won the Student Awards 30-day challenge with their fantastic creativesear.ch.  The challenge launched at the end of September with 15 teams and Petter &  Kaspar are the last ones standing.  The prize is a paid placement at AMV.BBDO. 

 

The team, along with Philip Cristofor, developed Creativesear.ch, an aggregate search engine that provides results in the form of pictures, text, film and music.  In its first month, the site became the single biggest referring site to www.dandad.org/studentawards.

 

Our President, Paul Brazier (not so coincidentally also ECD at AMV) said,“Petter & Kasper did what creative thinkers should - they saw a problem and solved it.  The creativesear.ch positions D&AD where it belongs - as the first place to go for inspiration.  Most importantly, they answered the brief. I was impressed by the fact that they understood the tone needed for D&AD and presented it in a clear and dynamic way.  Well done to them, I’m looking forward to welcoming this team in to AMV for their work experience.” 

 

Over half of Student Awards 2010 briefs include a placement as part of the prize.  The winner of the Nokia interactive design brief will land a 3 to 6 months paid placement in their creative department; Which? is offering a 12-week paid placement to one of the winners of the Integrated Communication brief; De Facto will offer a paid placement to a Viral brief winner, along with  £1000 if they decide to use the idea.  Finally, New British Design will create a prototype and help market at least one of the winning furniture designs.  Further additional benefits are available - have a look on the site to learn more. 

We are - ShellsuitZombie - your friends.

Give a design grad a job and he'll be employed for two years. Give him the means to get one himself and he'll be moderately wealthy with a detached home in SE18 by the time he's forty - Ancient Proverb

Hi readers, we're ShellsuitZombie, a small graduate organisation whose aim is to cut through the crap and help you get yourself into the creative industry. Since we graduated just over a year ago we've collectively been hired eight times, lost two jobs, worked in London and Paris, freelanced for some great and awful people and for some and no money, lived in A LOT of different houses, bought six bicycles and baked a cake. Using this experience (mainly the baking) we set up SSZ to encourage both graduates and the creative industry to fall in love again.

We try to do this in three ways.

1. Forget 'Mother', think brothers.

Through our website we put graduates and their work on a level playing field with the work that inspires them. After all, what x Art-Director did with £12 million shoot is of limited relevance to a poor student whose budget is second hand baked beans tins. At our stage you can't just throw money at stuff, the idea has to be good, and a lot of yours beat the pros hands down.

2. Let's get boozed

Don't take that title too literally, but booze (and socials in general) work wonders for smashing some of the employer-employee (or industry-graduate) barriers that might taint more formal events (dare I say, such as New Blood). When the whiff of desperation has passed, we can all have a larf. Our events try to make that happen. In addition graduates sharing advice and stories with each other is invaluable - A room full of them can only be a good thing.

3. REVOLUTION

We proudly (and angrily at times) act as a voice against those who would have everyone believe there isn't a hope for graduates, the nay-sayers who sit on their thrones and spout condescending and patronising garble about the number of grads per job, the state of education and the inevitability of our collective fate in Broken Britain. We really hate those guys.

So there you have it. We are all working graduate creatives from backgrounds in design and advertising who have a passion for making this whole process easier, less stressful and most importantly more fun for you guys. No-one chooses a creative career as a fallback, it's a way of life. We've had tough times over the last 18 months but there isn't one of us who would swap them for a management recruitment salary and an easy time. Sod that, we make shit look good.

ShellSuitZombie at D&AD New Blood 2009

Please come and visit us at www.shellsuitzombie.co.uk where you can sign up to our mailing list to find out about future events/competitions, submit your work, subscribe to our RSS feed and have a closer look at what we do. We also like twitter (@shellsuitzombie) very much, so hit us up on that bad boy.

Peace, Love and Cakes Galore

Jonny Burch

ShellsuitZombie

What's it like inside an agency?

We were really interested to read that the theme of the November issue of Creative Review is based on creative workplaces - what they look like and what people do there. http://creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2009/october/cr-november-issue.

This is something we have also been developing as part of the online resource available for tutors in our University Network and more will be available from a range of creative practitioners in the coming months. This information is great because it brings together a diverse set of experiences which can help graduates - and those more mature professionals - to decide what kind of organisation suits their individual skill set.

Creativity and the Brain

Thinkbox is a creative resource for anyone wanting to break into TV advertising. Here Lindsey Clay, Thinkbox's marketing director talks about the resource and how useful it proves as a teaching tool:

Creatives don’t generally wear white lab coats. They would probably align themselves with art before science. And, until relatively recently, if asked how creativity worked in advertising or why we actually need it, the answer would have been based more on gut feeling than scientific fact. It just worked.

But there have been giant steps in recent years in breaking down ad creativity, peeling back its finely crafted, precious layers to better understand exactly how it works and, from this, how to make it work better.

At the centre of this revolution in understanding is neuroscience. Creativity may have been thought to be a neuro-art, but the more we understand about psychology and how brand communications actually work on our brains – how they physically, chemically affect our grey matter – the more we understand the importance of great creative work in doing what advertising does: selling things.

So, I’d like to invite you to an event that has already happened. Last year, Thinkbox brought together some of the very biggest brains to offer their thoughts and research into how TV advertising works on the mind. TV was already proven to be the most effective ad medium around, but what actually makes it so effective?

On stage you can see the feted likes of Paul Feldwick challenge the assumption that ads need to have explicit messages in them; Robin Wight, Chairman of The Engine Group & WCRS, explore how theories about the brain and creativity are brought to life specifically and practically in TV advertising; and Justin Gibbons, Founder of Work Research and the man behind PHD's famous 'neuroplanning' research, talk about how brands actually live in the brain.

Sit back and let us welcome you to a world of ‘low involvement processing’, 'implicit' learning and ‘emotivation’; a world where the grey really matters. You can see it here. What you will see is how the art of creativity is behind the science of selling.

Future Creative Bursary Winners' Work Now Online

The winners of the Future Creative Bursary have now been announced. Sanky, Jim Sutherland and Greg Quinton, all members of our Executive Committee, chose their favourites.  The work is stunning, we hope you enjoy their selection. And congratulations to all the winners! 

Image: 'More or Less a Cook Book', by Lottie Crumbleholme

TALK TALK – A postscript to the Thoughtful Six Project

Last year D&AD showcased four inspirational education projects at our Student Awards. They looked at new ways of working and profiled examples of great collaboration between industry and education. You can watch the first film about the Thoughtful Six here.

Six months on, we asked them to talk about their experiences. One of the lead tutors and D&AD University Network member James Corazzo from Stockport College talks about it:

The Thoughtful Six Project, in simple terms, turned the idea of the work placement on its head – rather than the students trying to find a work placement in lots of different design agencies, Thoughtful design agency did a placement in Stockport College.

The genesis of the project came from thinking about how little design educators and design professionals actually talk to each other and how when we do, we often fail to get beyond the same old clichés and finger pointing. This has to change. The design industry desperately needs a better understanding of design education and design education desperately needs a better understanding of the design industry.

We can’t claim to have nailed the whole understanding thing but by moving a design agency into the department it created an opportunity to start a dialogue. Whether it was while passing in a corridor or towards the end of the day, we had lots of conversations that ranged, as good ones do, all over the place - but they always came back to the students, design, and design education. However, unlike many discussions I have experienced with design professionals never once did a sentence begin “you should be doing this…”.

Perhaps, because we had the time and the opportunity to get to understand the complexities of each other’s situations we started to recognise the similarities, not the differences; we are all in the business of dealing with, or helping people deal with, an increasingly complex and uncertain world.

If I had to summarise what the six students that worked with Thoughtful got from the project – a fine looking portfolio, a CV enhancing placement, knowing how to talk to people, a good story and a network of contacts aside – ultimately it was the sustained insight into dealing and coping with uncertainty.

Having Thoughtful live and work in the college for the last 12 months has also had an enormous impact beyond the six students and not in the ways we might have anticipated. The dialogue has provoked us to reconfigure what we do, perhaps surprisingly, we are moving away from explicitly industry focused projects towards broader approaches that focus on cultivating individuals whose creative thinking is only one aspect alongside resourcefulness and resilience. It has also prompted the idea of developing a more agile and responsive curriculum – a challenge within an institutional framework.  

And its not just been one way, Thoughtful have changed too; “we can see how tutors are able to stand shoulder to shoulder with the soldiers in the trenches as well view the battle from the top of the hill. This gives good tutors a unique and expansive view of the world and how design and their students fit into that world.”

We’re involved with the University Network because we think it’s uniquely placed to enable and encourage institutions to find innovative ways to configure, extend and deepen their relationships with design professionals, not because we should be mirroring industry, but because good dialogue will create a richer ecology. D&AD can move the debate on by creating constructive forums and opportunities to draw insightful industry voices into a sustained collaboration with educators.

But it's not just design educators and design professionals that should be yakking more, it needs to happen between institutions, more sharing, more talking. Bring on the real network.

Thoughtful are an ideas agency for the 21st century whose clients include Tate, British Council, howies, innocent and Royal Mail. James Corazzo is a Lecturer on the BA(Hons) Graphic Design course at Stockport College. If you would like to know more about the project James would be very happy to hear from you. Please comment or ask questions below.

Everyone starts somewhere

Piccadilly Circus, by 2nd year student, Richard Seymour

Throughout his year as D&AD President, Garrick's underlying theme has been that 'Everyone starts somewhere'. He has hosted the odd pub event where leading creative lights have shown their early work and has asked his President's Lecturers to include a student piece or two into their talks.

We've now brought all of this and more together into an 'Everyone starts somewhere' exhibition. If you're at New Blood this week, you'll be able to see the exhibition up on the balcony. If you can't make it, we've also put an online gallery together, with all the pics up on Flickr.

NOMINATE YOUR FUTURE CREATIVES NOW. (PLEASE)

We need you!

2009 has been a poignant year for both business and creativity. With this in mind, and to give industry a ‘helping hand,’ Adobe has joined forces with D&AD to introduce the Future Creative Bursary.

As an investment in the next generation, the bursary offers ten graduates or junior creatives a great platform to shine. It’s designed to provide the necessary tools to help them take those next steps and develop their talent further.

The entry deadline is 7 August, so if you know of a rising star who you'd like to nominate for one of the bursaries, please visit the awards website to find out more.

Re: Design Weeks Article: Students Urged to Avoid Design

This Design Week article certainly cooked up a storm. And with good reason; it’s a sensitive subject. I responded, pointing out that whether or not these comments are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is only one question. We should also consider that they may represent a knee-jerk and poorly thought-out response to an issue that has many and complex causes, ranging from reforms in education to the global economic crisis. They don’t do the design industry justice in terms of its value as a profession. You can read my comment at the bottom of the article.

I have another newspaper article sitting on my desk, which coincidentally surfaced from D&AD’s archives a couple of weeks ago. It is entitled ‘Design Talent Faces Future on the Dole’, and was written 24 years ago.

The parallels are quite remarkable. Written by Michael Smith, the industrial editor of the Guardian, it talks about the oversupply of talent to the industry and the risk of graduates ‘increasingly taking their talent overseas’. As long ago as 1985 the government had produced something called the Verry-Pick report, which prompted this article and according to Michael Smith ‘paints a disturbing picture of how Britain neglects and underestimates the importance of designers’.

Here’s a couple more quotes from the article that echo things we are hearing today in publications such as The Cox Report:

‘If UK trade is to remain viable and indeed if trade is to grow, the UK industrial trading sector must not simply focus on costs, but must also turn its attention to the quality of the goods it produces … [sectors] like design may account for up to half of a nation’s successful trade performance … It is vital that Britain keeps pace with developments elsewhere… It’s failure to do so will mean that markets will disappear, exports will fall and import penetration will increase.’

In the light of all the talk about markets like China and India, which seem to represent the same problem today as was being faced in 1985, I wonder whether people think that progress was made, or whether we are facing similar issues today because not enough was done back then?

Laura Woodroffe, Education and Professional Development Director