D&AD festival: creative industries fight back against doomsday narrative

By 1983, the Swiss watch industry was whittled down from 1,600 to 600 and those that survived started to emphasize so-called “complications”, extra functionality, which differentiated them while recognizing their craft. In doing so, they guaranteed their survival.

At this point, the audience is starting to realize that AI is the quartz oscillator and the design industry the Swiss watch manufacturers.

Maschmeyer reasons that Collins’s approach is not to make things more complex but to define what goes into making an identity by spelling it out and itemizing it for clients. The agency calls these facets ‘augments.’

Examples of this are a ‘sandbox’ which allows for “open-ended expressions” of a brand within a fixed boundary. There were also defined phrases and design methods for ways brands can work with third-party content and many more definitions of what composes an identity system. One other, ‘color graphs,’ shows clients how “experience is organized around color to enhance accountability and understanding.”

“The industry has been doing these things for a long time, but it’s never had the credit because it didn’t name it,” says Mashmeyer.

The big lesson then is “find new language to express the performance features of what you do, because that’s what’s going to matter going forward,” according to Mashmeyer, who adds, “We have to introduce the idea of performance, which we’ve always done before, but it’s now time for us to get credit for it.”

Elsewhere, Nils Leonard was pushing back on the notion that it’s “the worst time in human history to start a creative company.”

Ignoring what you know about traditional advertising would be a sensible way to approach the challenge, he argued, when I caught up with him. In fact, he wouldn’t do any of the kind of work he’s done in the past and would instead focus on making things – real-world objects – or “narrative objects” as he’s come to call them.

Although you may have heard him use this phrase before – remember the Rat Boot? – now he wants to take it further and there will be a lot more of this in future work, particularly “at a larger scale”, with projects involving retail spaces and a big project in the US that’s in production.

The importance of craft and making was underscored across the two-day event. The fact that Airbnb’s vice-president of design Teo Connor was sat on stage with psychologist Dr Paul Marsden of the University of the Arts, showed us the importance that a large in-house team placed on humanity. It was the first talk of the first day.

For Marsden, craft resonates with consumers where it shows “competence and care”. Really, this is one of the principles of back-to-basics user-centric design, but it’s worth underscoring as it should be fundamental to creating anything.

Quite simply you should “make sure what you’re putting in front of people matters,” says Connor.

If you want to be truly inspired to get out there and make things, you need to hear Aardman director and designer Gavin Strange speak. On stage, he whipped through his personal projects, made under the name Jamfactory.

“In the business of commercial creativity, try to find the excitement and the charm in everything you do, even if you’re being asked to make a logo bigger,” he implored a buoyant auditorium.

His talk, however, was really about the benefit of making for the sake of making and doing it for yourself rather than a client and the benefits of this.

Off stage, I spoke to him about his Aardman team and how they deliver work designed to “delight” audiences, whether commercials or films are being made. The ingredients, he tells me, are “comedy, character, story and craft.” The full interview is coming soon.

I’ll also be sharing an in-depth interview with D&AD president Kwame Taylor-Hayford, who showed that the messages being shared on stage weren’t constructed or choreographed in any way as they were reflected in the winning work celebrated across the D&AD awards.

He noted that the other major theme of the festival was the shake-up in the agency landscape. “The door has opened for newer agency and design studio approaches that are prioritizing bravery and imagination. Senior talent is working directly with brands and creative people can do what they do in a structure that supports their needs.”

In the upcoming interview with Taylor-Hayford, the first president from the US, we get into D&AD’s expansion plans as it looks to become a global organization by targeting events and education activity in several regions to support the global nature of its awards.

This year’s D&AD wasn’t a blind exercise in pretending AI isn’t important or that it isn’t coming for your job. Quite the opposite. It was an exercise in accepting what’s coming and celebrating your humanity, not as an empty gesture but by showing what designing and creating with clarity, definition, physicality and feeling can achieve.

All photographs by Owen Billcliffe