Hasta La Ideas

D&AD has announced the winners of its New Blood student awards, with three black, four white and 20 yellow pencils going to projects for Nationwide, Airbnb, WeTransfer, WWF, Pantone, BBC, Vice and more. Here’s our pick of this year’s top projects…

Over 280 students received pencils this year, with winners hailing from 49 countries. Greg Ormrod and Thomas Worthington received a black pencil (the top prize) for How it Should Be, a campaign for Nationwide to raise awareness of the gender pay gap and position the bank as an organisation lobbying against financial injustice.

The project was submitted in response to a brief to position the bank as “a future facing brand you can trust.” The pair proposed sponsoring a ‘Page 2’ feature in newspapers to celebrate the achievements of inspirational women, as well as publishing a gender report using customer data on salary, gender and occupation to highlight wage inequality, and printing a limited edition £1 coin to raise awareness of the fact that women earn 85p for every £1 a man does:

Nu Ri Kim, Seunghoon Shin and Yoonshin Kim from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were also awarded a black pencil for their response to a brief from Pantone, which asked students to “reimagine your home town through a new colour scheme.”

The group suggested painting the streets of Seoul with hydrochromatic paint during its annual monsoon season, which would turn opaque in the rain to reveal brightly coloured artworks on pavements. They also suggested setting up an online gallery allowing people to share photos of the project and augmented reality billboards showing the paint changing colour:

University of Lincoln graduate Tom Watkins received the final black pencil of the night for When I’m a Dad, a response to a brief from WeTransfer to “envision where you would like to be in ten years time through illustration”. Watkins produced a printed book imagining 10 great things to do as a father and set up a website, whenimadad.com, which features various ‘Dad pledges’ illustrated by GIFs and memes.

White pencil-winning projects included Frazer Price, John Trainor and Teddy Souter (from the School of Communication Arts 2.0)’s Endangered Soles, a response to a WWF brief to “inspire a new generation to understand that we all have an impact on our planet and its health”.

The group proposed partnering with Puma to launch a series of limited edition shoe collections highlighting the dwindling populations of endangered wild cat species. Each year, the number of shoes made in each range would tally with the number of cats left in the wild from that species, from Bengal Tigers to Snow Leopards:

Arts University Bournemouth student Hilda Cortel also received one for her response to Pantone’s brief, a playful text-based identity for Croydon based on residents’ accents, which aims to celebrate the area’s diversity:

Several yellow pencils were awarded to promotional campaigns for Airbnb, including Kimberley Ong, Akarad Tachavatcharapa, Zarina Mendoza and George Widodo’s Be Someone Else project, which allows users to browse Airbnb experiences by choosing who they want to be rather than where they’d like to stay:

Central Saint Martins’ Ryan Ho and Chloe Lam received a yellow pencil for their clever response to BBC’s brief to engage 15-24-year-olds. The pair devised an app, BBC Jumpstart, to replace user’s alarm clocks in the morning, which offers a curated feed of music, news and audio content, tailored to the time they have available and their preferences:

Ben Silverton & Sidney Lim, also from CSM, developed BBC Surge, a social news platform which allows users to boost content by voting on it, and orders news in response to what people are talking about and sharing most online:

Chelsea College of Art’s Stella Murphy received a yellow pencil for her ident for Vice series, Rule Britannia:

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As did Kingston University group STRING (Jonathan Zheng, Anna Streit, Ines Nirkko and Jennifer Zheng):

Other yellow pencils went to Felix Nilsson and Nayeli Kremb (Berghs School of Communication and Hyper Island) for Eco-Route, a WWF platform which calculates the most efficient route for drivers planning a journey, and gives users the option to donate to the charity to compensate for their carbon emissions:

And William Lanham from Birmingham City University, who received one for his typographic film idents, submitted in response to a Monotype brief to “create a new visual language for film advertising.” Lanham designed typographic idents for science fiction films Blade Runner and Alien, based on the interfaces featured in each film. Text hints at key plot developments, without giving too much away for those who haven’t seen them:

To view the full list of winning projects and each of this year’s briefs, see dandad.org/newblood