New Work: D&AD Student Awards

As reported in Creative Review, a Pentagram team led by Domenic Lippa has designed the promotional campaign and identity of the D&AD Student Awards for the fourth year running. The awards are the most popular design competition for students in the world; in 2008 they received over 3600 entries from students at over 150 colleges in 33 countries, responding to briefs across the disciplines set by organisations such as Unilever, Orange and Vitra. For a lucky few students, the inclusion of their work in the Annual, a compilation of the most noteworthy entries to the awards, is the highlight of their educational career. In 2009 the D&AD plans to take the annual online, making it accessible to as many people as possible. Pentagram’s identity highlights the dramatic change that the movement of the annual away from print and in to the digital world represents.

Taking the digital representation of a physical object as its starting point, the identity is based around a pixellated spectrum of colours. This spectrum is applied across the various applications of the identity such as the website and the briefing postcards distributed to colleges and universities.

Pentagram’s mark for the awards, composed of 29 squares arranged in the form of one of the D&AD’s iconic Pencil awards also receives the colour spectrum treatment. The mark also acts as a navigation device on the website, where the 27 briefs set for this years awards are represented by the individual squares of the pattern.

Pentagram has also designed promotional posters for the awards that continue the theme of digital representation. What at first appear to be abstract compositions of coloured squares turn out, when viewed from a distance, to be highly pixellated detail photographs of the D&AD Pencil.

Project Credits: Domenic Lippa, Partner-in-Charge; Beatrice Blumenthal, Designer.