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…

Remember when you used to draw your logos with a pencil? Check out Bob Truby’s Brand Name Pencils if these days you’re more familiar with a mouse or Wacom pen.

I keep finding interesting things on the internet, deciding that I’d like to own one, looking desperately around for the ‘buy me’ button and then realising that it isn’t a product at all, but an inspired idea from a designer which hasn’t found its way into production yet.

The latest case of this syndrome is the Peg Pencil from Japanese designer Yuta Watanabe. There are more equally lovely things on his site.

But no ‘buy me’ button…

In order to spread the festive cheer, I thought I’d dig out this old Christmas card I designed in a previous life at Mystery. It’s still one of my favourites…

Happy Christmas everyone!

Design studio Bunch are running a project inviting designers to come up with a visual response to their logo as part of their new identity. There are an impressive (and less impressive) array of entries so far, with names such as Malcolm Garrett and Stefan Sagmeister in the list. I chose to take their Letter B as it reminded me of the end of a pencil. Entrants were also asked to sign their work, so my signature became part of the design.

The logo looks like this:

See all the entries at www.madeinbunch.com