D&AD run their Student Awards annually, and commissioned Airside to conceive and design a campaign to attract more entries from students to the competition. The campaign's goal was to highlight the importance of the D&AD Student Awards within the design industry.

For such an all-encompassing brief we decided to create a central metaphor that could be applied at every stage of the project - covering the initial advertising to the awards ceremony itself.

Recognising the idiosyncratic tastes of our target audience we depicted students as hares, shown in varying degrees of danger to illustrate just how useful the D&AD Student Award could be in post-college life.

The result was a consistent and surreal campaign that featured our hares attempting to survive in a fantastical world of indifferent art colleges - only those equipped with a D&AD Yellow Pencil looked able to survive.

This absurdist theme was continued throughout the project with the design of the winner's Annual, depicting the hares flourishing in their various post-college careers, the awards ceremony and the construction of the final exhibition.

The campaign was so successful that entries increased by 25% that year, such was this increase, D&AD asked us to create another Student Awards campaign the following year. For this, we created a more abstract campaign using patterns of objects, where only the golden yellow of D&AD 's coveted Pencil stands out in the throng.

1 x Advertising campaign, including posters, brochures, press advertising and postcards
1 x D&AD Student Award annual design
1 x Event design, including award ceremony, program materials and exhibition
1 x Ambient animations (projected during award ceremony)

"Airside throw away the rule book... They're also one of the most down to earth agencies I've ever worked with. And they employ nice people."

Ian Willingham, D&AD