My ongoing quest to win a D&AD Yellow Pencil is looking up. Well, sort of. They just announced that from this year, projects selected to feature in the Annual, will all win a physical award. It’s not quite a pencil, but rather cute little slices from one. In fact, if your work is actually nominated for a pencil, you get a bigger slice.

So given that the Vodafone Music project I worked on was featured in-book in 2009, I wondered if I might be able to get one of these slices retrospectively. Using the power of Twitter I enquired, and it turns out that anyone featured in-book since 2000 can apply retrospectively for a pencil slice coaster award by emailing the D&AD at celebrate@dandad.org

So if you’ve had a close shave (pencil shaving awards would have been a great idea) with the D&AD this millennium, drop them an email and you could be entitled to a part-pencil.

Nice. Now I just have to work on getting my hands on a whole one…

I don’t get very excited about the Oscars I’m afraid. It’s all a bit GMTV for me, but this year there’s been an interesting winner in the short films category. Logorama is a 15 minute film by H5 including a mind-boggling array of (mainly American) logos used in some really clever ways. Watch the trailer above to get the idea.

Apparently it took 6 years to create, I wonder how many of the companies they were using rebranded during that time…

There’s been a bit of a row online about it, as the entire film (which I’ve chosen not to show here) was leaked and – wait for it – the film makers did not have legal permission from all the companies whose logos they’ve used, to, er, use them. People hosting the entire film, or uploading it to youTube etc are getting slapped on the wrists as we speak, but that seems a bit hypocritical – If the film makers didn’t respect the rights of the logo owners, then they can hardly complain if people don’t respect their own intellectual property in turn.

Anyway, let’s all just be friends. If you want to watch the whole thing, it’s available on iTunes, or through some tactical Googling.