Nine Graphics and User Experience Design students win at the D&AD New Blood Awards

D&AD New Blood Awards 2021, have announced their winning shortlisted entries, and from over 6000 entries worldwide, 9 Graphic Design and Illustration, and User Experience Design students have won an award.

The highly prestigious awards are an opportunity to work on real briefs, set by real clients, which are then judged by the industry’s top creatives. It opens doors for students to potentially land a job in the creative industry by getting a head start whilst they are still studying at university or for recent graduates and emerging creatives to gain the exposure they need to kick start their career.

The winning responses are as follows:

Brief: Get listeners to soundtrack and share their life through Spotify
Winner: Ceara Horwood and Fran Butler
Response: Spotify Spot

We all love a Spotify generated playlist, but now it’s time to move users into the spotlight.

Spot is a feature whereby users can create playlists that capture key moments in time, by tagging them with a location and a date, and pinning them to the Spot map.

Read more here.

Brief: Use fresh language to let people know that Burger King’s menu is 100% real
Winner: Amber-Jade Jenkins
Response: Your Favourite Toxic King Wants A Fresh Start

Burger King have been playing with fire and their reputation has been flame-grilled in the process. Customers were only a Google search away from finding out that Burger King’s preservatives were described as harmful, giving a whole new meaning to what the internet folk are calling a ‘Toxic King’.

Read more here.

Brief: Tell the giffgaff recycle story with illustration and animation
Winner: Claudia Swingewood and Nathan Monaghan
Response: cold. hard. cash.

Mobile phones lay wasted in drawers; drawers now in fact full of finite resources and cash.

Our team aims to encourage current and potential members to recycle their phone for the imaginative incentive of all the ways that they could spend the money. Within this brief, we wanted to get people thinking about this clunky, boring effort as more of a win for them.

Read more here.

Brief: Tell the giffgaff recycle story with illustration and animation
Winner: Tim Nejad
Response: The Fight Against E-waste

The main challenge of this brief was coming up with a creative way of telling the giffgaff recycle story whilst acknowledging the environmental benefits of recycling your phone. My solution was to create a narrative surrounding e-waste and use characters as tangible assets for viewers to engage with, most obviously shown in the TV ad and supported by social media assets.

Read more here.

Brief: Get listeners to soundtrack and share their life through Spotify
Winner: Benedict Blyth, Haidar Darr, and Maria Chanduvi
Response: Spotify Space

Music is meant to be social. It brings us together, forming communities all around the world. But recently, the distance between us has made it harder to connect and share the music that means the most to us.

To bring back that feeling of community, we asked Spotify listeners what they miss about experiencing music together. It turns our; users wish to get a reaction from friends when they share their favourite songs and discover new music in a meaningful way.

Read more here.

The winners will find out at the New Blood Awards 2021 ceremony, which is taking place virtually on Thursday 8 July which pencil levels they have been awarded.

Congratulations to all our students!