Topping the 51st D&AD Awards this evening were four Black Pencil recipients and one White Pencil winner, with 51 Yellow Pencils awarded to the best of the world’s design, advertising and communications work.
Black Pencils are bestowed upon work that is not just considered the best in the world in its category, but for pieces of design or advertising that have fundamentally changed the rules of the category. The four Black Pencils this year were awarded to:
o McCann Erickson Melbourne’s “Dumb Ways to Die” for Metro Trains (Integrated & Earned Campaigns) scooped up one of the top accolades
o 4creative’s “Meet the Superhumans” for Channel 4 (TV & Cinema Communications);
o Heatherwick Studio’s “Olympic Cauldron” for the London Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Spatial Design/Installations)
o And GOV.UK’s website for Her Majesty’s Government (Writing for Websites & Digital Design).
Incorporated into this year’s awards for the first time was a coveted White Pencil, established to recognize work that can affect real and positive change in the world. The White Pencil went to Droga5, New York for it Help Remedies “Help! I Want to Save a Life” campaign.
This year’s 51 Yellow Pencils acknowledged work that is judged to be the best in the world, selected from projects that receive a nomination during judging.
Receiving the highest number of Yellow Pencils this year was McCann Erickson Melbourne’s “Dumb Ways to Die” (Australia), which scooped Yellow Pencils across five categories (Art Direction, Earned Media Campaigns, Digital Advertising, TV & Cinema Advertising and Writing for Film Advertising) as well as taking a Black Pencil.
Another significant winner was 4creative, for its “Meet the Superhumans” campaign (UK), which was awarded Yellow Pencils across four categories for Editing for Film Advertising, TV & Cinema Communications, Direction for Film Advertising and Use of Music for Film Advertising as well as a Black Pencil.
Other campaigns taking multiple awards were R/GA’s “Nike+ FuelBand” (US), taking three Yellow Pencils, while Leica Store S๏ฟฝo Paulo’s “Soul” (Brazil) and 20th Century Fox’s “Prometheus Viral ‘David'” (UK) each won two Yellow Pencils.
In total, 618 awards were given by 2013 D&AD juries across In-Book, Nominations and Yellow, Black & White Pencils, with work from over 35 countries recognized.
Film Advertising Crafts was the category awarded the greatest number of Yellow Pencils–12.
The most awarded categories overall (across In-Book, Nominated & Yellow Pencil work) were:
The Graphic Design category, taking 100 gongs, including two Yellow Pencils
TV & Cinema Advertising with 46 pieces of creative work awarded, including three Yellow Pencils
Digital Advertising with 40 awards, including three Yellow Pencils
Conversely, juries in the Book Design, Magazine & Newspaper Design and Press Advertising categories did not award any pencils this year.
Countdown by country
The UK led a strong showing, scooping up 202 awards overall, including three Black Pencils and 17 Yellow Pencils. Work from the US also did well, with entries gaining 113 awards in total (of which 13 were Yellow Pencils).
In 2013, European nations performed well, with Sweden and France leading the way in the region with 16 Awards each, of which two were Yellow Pencils. German work picked up 13 awards overall, including two Yellow Pencils.
Australia had a particularly strong year, achieving 50 awards overall, including a Black Pencil and seven Yellow Pencils, whilst work from New Zealand scooped 15 awards overall including 2 Yellow Pencils. The region put in a record performance taking 65 awards overall.
Meanwhile, work from Asia was also well recognized, with Japan leading the region with 26 awards, including two Yellow Pencils, followed by Singapore, who took 16 awards overall (with one Yellow Pencil). China scooped up 7 awards overall (of which one Yellow Pencil) whilst Thailand gained five In-Books.
Brazil topped the Latin American league table of awards, with 29 pieces of work recognized by the juries, including four Yellow Pencils, a record 37 percent increase in awards from 2012.
Lucy Walker Made A Searing Documentary About Wildfires In 2021; Now, People May Be More Inclined To Listen
When Lucy Walker debuted her harrowing documentary about California wildfires, "Bring Your Own Brigade," at Sundance in 2021, it was during peak COVID. Not the best time for a film on a wholly different scourge.
"It was really hard," the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says now. "I didn't blame people for not wanting to watch a film about the fires in the middle of the pandemic, because it was just too much horror."
And so the film, though acclaimed โ it was named one of the 10 best films of the year by the New York Times โ didn't reach an audience as large as Walker had hoped, with its urgent display of the human cost of wildfires and its tough, crucial questions for the future.
That could change. Walker thinks people may now be more receptive to her message, given the devastating wildfires that have wrought havoc on Los Angeles itself the past week. Firefighters were preparing on Tuesday to attack new blazes amid warnings that winds combined with severely dry conditions created a " particularly dangerous situation."
"This is probably the moment where it becomes undeniable," she said in an interview.
She added: "It does feel like people are now asking the question that I was asking a few years ago, like, 'Is it safe to live in Los Angeles? And why is this happening, and what can we do about it? And the good news is that there are some things we can do about it. What's tricky is that they're really hard to accomplish."
Documenting the human cost, confronting complacency
In "Bring Your Own Brigade" (available on Paramount+), Walker portrays in sometimes terrifying detail the devastation caused by two wildfires on the same day in 2018, products of the same wind event โ the Camp Fire that engulfed the... Read More