Jasna about D&AD and more

Jasna Manzoni is a fresh (and first) project manager in the digital agency Brlog. Before Brlog, she used to work in the London’s D&AD. She says that if she had more time, she would write a blog, so we gave her the chance to write in a blog post something about D&AD:

D&AD is a global organization that encourages creativity and innovativeness within the market communication industry. I spent two years in their warehouse office in East London, the centre of creative industries. This is the location of artists, fashion designers, marketing industry, for instance, the offices of W+K, Mother, Poke are located here, and of course Tech City – the largest European tech cluster.

This area of London is an unusual culture melting pot – from hipsters and geeks to the traditional Bangla community, whose many members do not even speak English. The locals call it vibrant. This is the view from the office of D&AD:

D&AD is known by most of people for the strictest industry awards for creative design and advertising that have celebrated the 50^th anniversary last year, and for the yearbook that used to be the main inspiration reference tool before the Internet era. But their activities include also lectures, laboratories, exhibitions, student mentoring and online content production, all in a stimulating environment and with the agenda to inspire, enable and award creative excellence.

D&AD is a non-profit organization, meaning that the entire income is invested back in the community, mostly for student support in the transition within the branch, as well as for the White Pencil initiative, where advertising and design stimulating positive changes in the community are shown and awarded. Even big brands, such as Unilever and Google, are more and more included in projects of this type.

Many inspirational people come often to D&AD for a cup of tea with milk, and to exchange ideas, some of them are legends, like John Hegarty (BBH) and Michael Wolff (WolffOlins), as well as some young, promising guys like Aaron Koblin or Neil Harbisson. The consciousness of giving back to the society is strong, and it is great that experts of such calibre want and actually find time to contribute with their knowledge, experience and contacts to the improvement of the community. Personally, I have been impressed mostly by Steve Vranakis (ex VCCP, now CD at Google Creative Lab), a very modest man and down to earth, passionate about using technology as the catalyst for social changes.

After-work entertainment is quite strong, a nice event is for example the Battle of Creatives – a pub night where the creative people, in a slightly drunk and very challenging environment compete in 5-minute briefings. The audience decides the winner of the round by applauding, and the winner is chosen by elimination.

It’s also great when, after the D&AD Awards, the projects that have participated, are distributed between the employees :) It looks like a very classy design flea market, and you can find many nice things, from chairs and posters to amazingly designed books, watches, (empty) bottles etc.

This is something to listen to: