So after experiencing a taste of the judging process earlier in the year, I somehow managed to infiltrate the D&AD Awards ceremony last night just up the road from work near Old Street. In actual fact I won a ticket from the kind people at Arjo Wiggins Creative Papers as part of The Blank Sheet project.

So, yesterday saw me don an actual real life shirt and tie and go along to the awards for the first time. And it was a night of firsts, as this year the professional and student awards were handed out together which was a brilliant idea. That, and the decision not to pay Jimmy Carr to do some patter, but to use the money for a free bar and ferris wheel, resulted in many people remarking that it was certainly ‘better than last year’. Well, I wouldn’t know as I have never been along before, but from my point of view it was better than last year, as in 2010 I followed the whole thing on Twitter from my living room.

Anyway, I digress. The evening was very nice indeed, pretty lavishly staged and posh food. The awards bit itself seemed to take an awfully long time, and was a little chaotic, with the different disciplines and the students/professionals all mixed up, but while a little difficult to follow it was continually inspiring. The room was huge, which wasn’t a problem for me as I’d scored a seat right up front, but at the back, the naughty kids were all chatting, doing shots and passing notes as you’d expect. In fact it got properly all Grange Hill when Sanky, D&AD President implored the crowd to ‘take the volume level down from 10 to 3 please’.

Well, as always it was all about the winners, which are well documented on the Creative Review blog this morning, and of course on the D&AD site itself, so you don’t need me to list them, but I thought it might be worth remarking randomly on some which from my perspective as a graphic designer, working with identity especially, I just liked…

The ‘Almost Extinct’ calendar for example, by The Chase sensitively brought home the perilous situation faced by various species whilst still remaining playful.

The V&A ‘Palindrome’ installation by Troika wonderfully played with reflection and symmetry.

Mucho’s Art Out typeface was elegantly beautiful, and reassuringly traditional.

The reality of the filthy rich was graphically illustrated by CHI & Partners for The Times Richlist.

And obviously there were loads more. It was a bit disappointing again though, to see that D&AD don’t appear to be particularly interested in traditional graphic design, and specifically identity. It felt a little bit like if you had done something vaguely digital, especially using an iPad, you stood a greater chance than if you had traditionally wrestled with a complex identity project and seen it through to a brilliant conclusion. There was a lot of moving image, and loads of nebulous brand campaign type stuff, but not nearly enough wonderfully executed and inventive graphic design. And don’t tell me there isn’t any out there, because there is.

Having said that, this year the student awards were given out on the same night, and they definitely did their bit to redress the balance. A lot of the student ideas were impressively imaginative and no less inspiring than the professional stuff. For example…

This brilliant idea from students at Design Factory International would turn a whole city into a sketchpad drawn on via GPS movement. It was in response to a brief set by Arjo Wiggins, who in conversation after the awards, sounded like they were thinking of doing it for real…

This project from students at RMIT University cleverly shows how important copywriting is to advertising.

But the star of the student show was the branding work for Oxfam by students from Miami Ad School, Madrid, which focused on what Oxfam employees wanted to do with their lives once the need for their charitable work was finally fulfilled. Genius, and not done justice by the following JPGs.

The star of the professional show? Well that was Neville Brody who received the President’s Award to rapturous applause.

Oh, and of course this guy…

Overall, after feeling all warm and fuzzy towards the D&AD during judging week, when it was all informal and drenched in sunlight, this felt much more elitist as you might expect. I think because during judging there was a lot of work on show of varying standards it all felt very accessible and democratic, whereas on awards night obviously only the best got through and some of the egos and agendas in the room were tangible. One winner of a black pencil was heard to remark “I’ve waited 25 years for this” which just goes to show how very important it was to almost everyone there. In contrast to some of the po-faced professional recipients, most of the students were elated, and one even danced all the way up the stage and punched the air. After seeing that, you wondered why some of the luminaries of the industry couldn’t crack a smile.

And so that was it, I had a great evening and managed to avoid spending the night wandering around on my own. Big thanks must go to Jonathan and the guys from Arjo Wiggins for making me feel so welcome. It was especially nice to meet a few people who before that night I had only ‘met’ via Twitter too. But of course next time I go to one of these things, it would be nice to be in the running for a pencil.

I can dream can’t I?

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…

Last week was judging week at D&AD, the week where the great and the good in the design industry get together and pass judgement on the work sent in by all the hopeful designers looking to gain their yellow-pencil-shaped approval.

Normally this is a closed process, but this year in addition to encouraging the judges to tweet their thoughts and publishing live lists of shortlisted work on their website, D&AD also offered to show groups round on judging day. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance and promptly invited myself.

I’ve been really glad to see this sort of openness finally coming from the D&AD. In the past, I wasn’t sure what to make of them. I was first introduced to the organisation as a student, and I diligently entered the student awards without really understanding the relevance of it all. There wasn’t as much information around back then, it felt like it was a mysterious private members club for the design elite, and not one a student designer who had come from a job on a trading estate in the West Midlands had any chance of ever belonging to.

Over the years I attended many of the lectures, and my various workplaces occasionally entered a project I had worked on, but the D&AD and I comprehensively failed to make any sort of impression on each other. It remained something out of my reach, the doors to the private members club stayed closed.

And then a couple of things happened. Firstly, a project I worked on, Vodafone Music, made it into the 2009 Annual. This was a big deal and seeing my name in the book alongside those of revered and respected practitioners was very satisfying. As a reward, I was given a year’s membership to the D&AD, and so little by little those austere doors started to open to me. (metaphorically of course). Things like Twitter had opened up design conversations too, and for the first time I found myself ‘talking’ to my design heroes directly, getting an insight into what lay inside the club, and a sense of the guts of my industry. I scoured eBay and started collecting the Annuals (at the time of writing I have every one from 1994 to present, plus a few others), studying the projects that made it – and those that won the coveted pencil – trying to figure out what they had in common. What was the formula for gaining entry to the winners’ hexagon, what was I up against?

This was the year that Matt Dent won the almost mythical black pencil for his UK Royal Mint coin designs. Something clicked. I had assumed these people were Dan Brown’s Illuminati, and I was going to have to learn their handshakes, but in actual fact you didn’t have to have studied at a legendary design school, have worked in a world-famous studio, or hang out on the yachts of monied industry figures to win a pencil. You just had to have a great idea and do it well. Matt was proof. That’s what all the winners had in common. (well, most of them anyway) Although both the Illuminati and graphic designers do share a love of ambigrams…

So flash forward to the present day, and there I am walking around in the Grand Hall at Olympia, looking at the work through the eyes of a D&AD judge (metaphorically of course). Some of it was already famous from the blogosphere, some was new and some things you could tell weren’t going to make it (including a poster of mine, but that’s another story). The judges were all debating the merits of things and there was an atmosphere of warm sincerity to the whole thing. Everyone was taking their duty very seriously. Work was laid out anonymously and each piece got an equal shot at greatness. It was inspiring, some of the work was phenomenal. I did genuinely feel welcome (even if I comprehensively failed to find the courage to talk to anyone important), and it seemed that newcomers with a good idea can get noticed in such an open forum. It’s tough, but possible.

I was left with a renewed sense of possibility and the feeling that the D&AD was there for me if I wanted it (and had the money of course) and that all it really was, was a bunch of nice people who all loved design as much as I do. Perhaps I had judged it unfairly, perhaps if I stopped feeling intimidated by it all I could get involved.

I managed to hang around, to be present at the launch of the new White Pencil, which was quite a moment. A selfless award? An award which it’s promised will recognise a good solution be it large or small? An award which only costs £25 to enter? £25 for a shot at making the world a better place? That sounds like real progress. I’m in.

The evening ended at the pub, which, outside of the studio, I guess is the natural habitat of any designer. It was a warm spring evening and the beer tasted good, but of course it wasn’t the real world. Not the real world of clients, deadlines, briefs and budgets, and not the world I live in during working hours. So as welcoming as the D&AD are, and as tempting as it is to get drawn into – it seems to me that the best course of action is to stay in the real world. To look past the famous names, familiar JPGs and talismanic pencils, and focus on doing the best work possible. To win my own and my clients’ belief first and just hope somewhere along the way, some people stood around in the epic Olympia Grand Hall of the future see something they like. If they do, great, and if they don’t? Well I can come back sharper next year.

So it’s business as usual then, but somehow now after seeing it all from the inside, anything feels possible. And the door’s ajar…

Mike Dempsey came into work a couple of weeks ago to tell us about his inspirations and career. Mike is probably best known for being a founding member of CDT and also for his work on Royal Mail stamps. It’s taken me a little while to put this post together as Mike’s work isn’t that easy to find online, he seems to be a very modest chap and doesn’t often write about his own work. Even so, he was President of the D&AD in 1997 and has a fair few of those coveted pencils on his mantlepiece. He showed us some things which I’ve simply been unable to find online, so you won’t be seeing those. Sorry.

The talk took the form of a journey through his career from his earliest memories of discovering graphic design through the work of Josef Muller Brockmann to his subsequent enrolment on a local Calligraphy & Illuminated Lettering evening class to find out more. At that stage, he told us, he wasn’t even aware that there was such a ‘job’ as graphic design.

He started out designing book covers. He’d take books home from the library and redesign a better cover, just like the kids do online now. He took a portfolio of those to job interviews and found his way into work as a book cover designer. Over the years he designed covers for books and albums, as well as posters. He hungrily consumed all the influences and trends happening around him, including the groovetastic Pushpin in the swinging sixties:

“There’s nothing wrong with copying. Eventually you find your own personality but it takes a while”

These are his Fontana Modern Masters covers, a series which he simplified and based on a white background, admitting that he had even forgotten about art directing them until their recent renaissance. You can clearly see what he took from the sixties Pushpin aesthetic here.

“I’m as curious now as when I started as a 17 year old”

After founding CDT in 1979, he designed the fantastic English National opera logo:

As well as art directing the Royal Mail’s series of Millennium stamps in 1999. These subsequent ‘Sounds of Britain’ stamps show a clear influence from Apple’s iPod ads but are still lovely.

And Mike has kept working since leaving CDT, starting Studio Dempsey in 2008 to work on “projects I have a feeling for, for people that I like.” The projects have ranged from these stamps immortalising 10 British albums which broke the mould (die cut to show the vinyl spilling out…)

…to this understated logo for Beautiful Books…

“Being simple is quite difficult”

Mike is an active participant in the grassroots of the industry and has some strong opinions. His entry in last year’s Type Tarts exhibition was the only piece actually highlighting the misery of sex trafficking amongst the suggestive student innuendo. His contribution to The Art of Lost Words project was a little more upbeat:

MOLROWING: n. caterwauling; cavorting (as with prostitutes)

And his response to the D&AD’s 2007 flag project was pretty clear…

The main things I took away from the talk was that Mike didn’t get any real formal training in graphic design, he didn’t follow the established route, he just got out there, started doing it and eagerly learned everything he could. That was all very reassuring. People over in the Shillington College thread take note. He’s still doing it today, getting to grips with new technologies on one of his 5 Macs, through websites some of his contemporaries have still never heard of such as Ffffound!

Also, Mike hasn’t been afraid to copy great work. Perhaps ‘copy’ is a bit harsh (although that’s the word he used himself) but learn from great practitioners and investigate their work and influences. I was reminded of a quote I heard recently:

“It doesn’t matter where you take it from, only where to take it to…”

…which seemed to fit well.

These days in between design projects, Mike travels around interviewing great designers for the RSA’s RDInsights project which is well worth a listen. there seems to be no end to his curiosity – in fact, he says that his next wish is to direct a film:

“I’m fickle, I get bored easily and I’m not afraid to make mistakes.”

And his advice for aspiring graphic designers?

“Absorb. And please don’t just hang out with other graphic designers.”

You can join Mike’s graphic journey on his blog.

I went along to the D&AD lecture last night, during which it was stated we would finally decide whether Neville Brody is a wanker or a genius. Everyone was even given Ready Steady Cook style cards with Wanker on one side and Genius on the other to hold up at the end. We were also invited to tweet our questions live to the D&AD Twitter stream, where Adrian Shaughnessy would read them out, very modern.

So what is the problem with Neville Brody then? I admit I didn’t really get it before the lecture as a talented influential designer with a famous body of great work is obviously a genius. Why would you want to call him a wanker? The only people I’d confidently label wankers are Glenn Beck and Robbie Williams. Glenn for his distorted view of the world and insistence on everyone sharing it, Robbie for his ubiquity, arrogance and inexplicable chart success. It turns out Brody has all of these qualities (with the exception of radio airtime).

The theme of the talk came from an infamously virulent blog discussion on the Creative Review website after he was asked to design a cover for Wallpaper magazine:

The idea on the left was chosen, which decodes as reading ‘I hate design’ but it was the unchosen design on the right which really pissed people off, heralding it as final proof that Brody had become so famous and out of touch he had finally disappeared up his own arse.

The lecture was full, very full and Brody was walking around the crowd beforehand chatting to people. He had a ponytail, the sort of thing which you expect to see on a villain’s henchman in a bad 1990s Jean Claude Van Damme movie. I admit it, I was already tending towards ‘wanker’ at that point but I was keen to hear what he had to say and be taken through the work by the man himself.

And that’s where the problems began because the lecture didn’t turn out to be about Brody’s work. Sure, there were some JPGs being projected on the screen behind him but he didn’t tell us much about any of it or give us any real insights into the specifics of the briefs or projects. In fact Brody seemed to regard the whole idea of designing things for a client in a commercial context as smutty, and the prospect of explaining them made him squirm. He was far more keen to talk about politics, design education and changing the world. The excellent Adrian Shaughnessy looked visibly bored. There was a tangible frustration from the audience – who had all come straight from a hard day’s work problem solving for clients or tutors – at Brody’s unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of being a graphic designer in 2009. He would far rather talk about Margaret Thatcher and how he would run design education in Britain if he was in charge. At one point he said:

“If someone’s idea of success is getting shown on a certain website or blog, that’s like being on the noticeboard in a church hall. It’s a church, but not THE church.”

…so what church are we talking about Neville? THE church meaning the widest possible audience is all very well, if you’re Neville Brody you can talk and people listen, but most of us are just looking for an appreciative audience and haven’t managed to become a design celebrity already. Interestingly directly after this quote, he showed us his design for the D&AD annual itself, which surely must qualify as a particularly yellow note in a very specific church hall.

His utterly unrealistic idea for the annual of not allowing anyone to show images, but only printing large URLs to the work online was sure to anger designers who are proud of their work and have had to pay £160 for the book.

And it was that kind of slight hypocrisy coupled with uncompromising personal conviction which helped Brody come across as a bit smug and not overly likable despite the huge amount of admiration for him in the room. I tried to like him, I really did, but in the end I couldn’t warm to him the way it’s usually easy to when you go to a lecture by a design hero.

He did talk about some thought provoking stuff though, and is a fierce champion of the designer and their craft, lamenting the fact that anyone with a Mac and the CS Suite considers themselves a designer.

“You don’t need talent to learn skills”

“We’ve shifted from an appreciation of craft to personality”

He also obviously had some nice work, I particularly liked his typeface for Public Enemies and type treatments for Becks Futures.

He just seemed horribly out of touch with the actual job of being a designer, and happy to ignore how much he himself is defined by his celebrity and ‘trendy typefaces’ whilst criticising it wherever he detected it elsewhere. Brody is one of those designers who cut their teeth on record sleeves and magazine covers, which aren’t really proper ‘design’ problem solving as much as indulgent art with a commercial context. To all intents and purposes, Brody hasn’t been a designer for years, he’s clearly an artist you see:

“I hate the design that’s premeditated and calculated”

That’s what design IS though. Creative endeavour without parameters is art. To be honest I would be far more interested in attending a lecture about the design of Neville Brody, rather than one which ponders the lofty A-Level question of what design actually is, but that’s what we got.

“The shift from discovery to vanity in the name of finance”

He also seemed to find the prospect of the future depressing, which I couldn’t fathom. Any designer or creative person ought to be fired up by the future, excited by it by default, but I guess a man who has already made his name has more to fear from the future than those of us still trying.

A large proportion of the audience were students, and the following question and answer session was pretty pointless, with most questions being from people dissatisfied with their course for one reason or other, or actually simply wanting to ask Neville if he would come in and give them a similar talk in a smaller room for their friends. One guy in the audience was interested in occupational insurance for designers, which is surely a question best answered by the Churchill dog.

At the end of the lecture, the vote was taken, and despite being a pretty close thing, was recorded officially as a vote for Neville’s ‘Genius’ so there you have it, he is definitively a genius. Which of course we all know really.

Perhaps he just gets under some designers’ skin because they envy him, his freedom to do whatever he likes and how unapologetic he is for that, rather than anyone really thinking he is actually a wanker. But of course, as most people have suspected for years, all designers are wankers anyway.

The final word should go to the complete pointlessness of requesting the audience, present or absent, tweet questions to Neville in real time. Adrian Shaughnessy didn’t appear to have ever used Twitter in his life and the D&AD Twitter page was left unrefreshed from 10 minutes before the lecture started to the end. In fact Adrian simply scrolled down the list and when he reached the bottom, he clicked ‘more’ to load further, older tweets. Consequently neither Adrian or Neville actually saw anything that people tweeted during the lecture, which is a shame because I was really hoping he’d answer my “What advice would you give aspiring wankers?” question.

D&AD Lecture by Vince Frost. Nice guy and some great work. It was interesting to hear about the challenges of setting up again on the other side of the world and all the trials and tribulations along the way. I guess the only thing that made me raise an eyebrow was his almost militant insistence that there’s no such thing as a bad project only bad designers, while we all know not every job is a D&AD pencil winner. I guess it’s just an easy point of view to have if you happen to be Vince Frost, I’m trying to believe it even though I’m not…

A nice mix of work and the odd random fragment from his recent life, even if there was maybe one too many pictures of his kids! Amazingly he had taken a picture of the exact same thing as I had that very lunchtime. Great minds… Apologies for the poor pictures, I didn’t really want to attract any attention to myself with the flash. Click for a better view…