Hasta La Ideas

D&AD is often accused of only awarding the ‘usual suspects’ or the ‘big agencies’ but this year’s crop of Yellow Pencils included some genuinely interesting, off-beat projects, some of which we hadn’t seen before here at CR, others which we just thought were worth picking out.

First up is this winner in the Packaging category. The Trouble Maker Campaign from the HanTang Communications Group in China for Quzhou Seezo Trading puts dictator’s faces on condoms suggesting that the product’s use may have prevented the birth of some undesirables…

Next up, big agency but small project, again in Packaging: the Newspaper to New Paper Project from Dentsu Tokyo for Ichida Garden. Old newspapers were overprinted to provide wrapping for fruit and veg sold by a street vendor.

Das Comitee from Germany won in Photography for its Faces of Evil book in which the faces of despots were created using portraits of ordinary people

In Environmental Design, Studio Rasic from Croatia won for Bijela cesta ‘U iscekivanju kise’ (White road ‘Waiting for the Rain’). Created for the Mediterranean Sculptors’ Symposium, the project is in the Park of Sculptures in Labin, Croatia. It’s made from 1245 square blocks of highly polished limestone: 806 have cut-out circles which are allowed to become filled with rainwater and leaves to make the text legible.

Also from the Environmental category is the C]space DRL10 Pavilion by Nex Architecture for the Architectural Association’s Design Research Lab. The Pavilion won a competition to mark the DRL’s tenth birthday and was installed outside its HQ in London’s Bedford Square

In Websites, Tokyo’s Bascule won for the 12 CAMS, CREATE YOUR RAINBOW for Radiohead in which users could mix their own version of a live performance from 12 different cameras

Singapore’s Work

won in both Graphic Design and Illustration for WERK No.16: Joe Magee Special

Two other Yellow Pencil winners have been featured by us before: Nick Asbury’s Corpoetics booklet in which corporate mission statements are reworked into strangely revealing poems (we wrote about it here)

And Christopher Doyle’s personal Identity Guidelines, which we covered here. Both won in Writing for Design

Full results and nominations are here