If you’ve been on following our Instagram this week you will have seen that we visited the D&AD Festival in London. Two days of keynote speeches, presentations, workshops and panel discussions about all things Design and Art Direction! We saw some fantastic work that had been entered into the awards, and heard from experts in their respective fields.
Here are some of the highlights from the two days, along with inspiring and innovative work that was showcased.
Day 1
Panel: Type Design
Dyslexia Scotland – A very smart and funny campaign that challenged designers to rethink their opinion on the Comic Sans font and find ways to become more dyslexia friendly. You can read about Nothing Comic About Dyslexia here.
NRK TV – A great piece of typography design that adapts and adjusts to suit different platforms and mediums.
Panel: Designing Digital Spaces
Cultural Avatar – With a rise in the gaming industry in Africa, Orange worked with Publicis Conseil and fabric designers across Africa, to create new virtual avatars that represented the diversity of culture throughout the country.
Represent Me: WACL (Women in Advertising and Communications, Leadership)
A membership organisation whose purpose is to accelerate gender equality in the advertising and communications industries. They spoke about the importance of accurate representation, highlighting key statistics to consider in design, advertising and marketing, including:
- Men outnumber women in finance and home ads, even though women account for most consumer decisions, including 91% of new homes and 89% of bank accounts
- In top ads, male characters were given 2x as much time on screen and 2x as many speaking roles as women
We also had fantastic talks from:
- Depop on culture, community and collaboration
- WOO on wellbeing for Gen Z
- Unilever & Ogilvy on Dove Real Beauty Campaigns
Quote of the day: Chaka Sobhani:
‘Making people feel joy is the best way to connect to them’
Day 2
Panel: Digital Brand Experience
Urban Miner – In order to get more young people to recycle their old gadgets, a partnership of Elkjøp Nordic AS (part of Currys plc), Xbox and Mojang Studios launched an initiative that you could receive Minecoins when you took your electricals in to be recycled.
Virtual Tuvalu – With the rising sea levels due to climate change, Tuvalu is a disappearing country, so they are remaking it virtually to keep it alive.
Panel: Branding & Packaging
We love a rebrand project at Browndog! Here were some of the best that were shortlisted as part of the Branding and Packaging category at the D&AD awards.
Leibniz
Eames Institute
Coca-Cola
As you can imagine, it was a joy to listen to Rapha Abreu, Global Vice President of Design at The Coca-Cola Company describe the Coca-Cola experience and how their brand has evolved over the course of 107 years!
As an umbrella company, he displayed their most recent stunning rebrand projects, in partnership with JKR, for Fanta and Minute Maid.
We also had fantastic talks from:
- Stink Studios on finding new talent
- Spring Studios on creative burnout
- The New Yorker, Fukt & MagCulture on the process of creating print magazines
- Oatly on their marketing approach and tone of voice
