Hasta La Ideas

The new D&AD Annual launched yesterday at the London Design Festival. The members’ edition, art directed by Peter Saville and designed by recent graduate Luke Sanders, is to be followed by a version that will go on general sale next year, published by Taschen…

The design of the new members’ edition highlights D&AD’s work in education via a series of graphic statistics, as Saville explains.

“Garrick Hamm created the opportunity for me to guide Luke through the design of this year’s Annual, as a way for us to express D&AD’s educational program through practice,” he says. “The aesthetic of the design has been inspired and informed by the statistics of D&AD’s many activities and achievements.”

For Sanders, a recent design graduate, it was the navigation of D&AD Annuals past that inspired him to look at how this year’s Annual should take shape.

The latest edition sees the sections Advertising, Design, Crafts and Digital each separated by their own fold-over cover (see teal coloured Design section cover folded out, above). It gives the appearance of four separate book spines making up the Annual. On the main hardback spine itself, the work that D&AD does is divided up in a set of statistics that relate to the hexagonal cover graphic: Awards 30%; Online Content & Community 27%; Student Education 17%; Annual 5%; Professional Development 13%; Exhibitions & Lectures 8%.

“The design of this Annual explores a relationship between visual aesthetic and distilled functionality and how the two can begin to amalgamate,” says Sanders. “It documents the ‘metrics’ of the design industry, in particular, D&AD’s many achievements this year.”

Sanders also believes that choosing him to design this year’s member’s edition is indicative of D&AD’s commitment to education.

“I’m extremely thankful to D&AD who believe so wholeheartedly in their message of education that they would risk innumerable problems and potential disaster by nurturing an unknown to design their Annual,” he adds.

“Working with Peter has been a real privilege – as working for a person whom you genuinely admire often is. I have learnt from him that I do not need to be apologetic about evaluating everything from the minutest detail to the broadest concept, and that design is at it’s most interesting when integrity is at the core of its foundation.”

Next year, in a new partnership with Taschen, D&AD will publish a hardback version of the Annual, designed by Jeremy Leslie and distributed worldwide.