If you’re a creative professional wondering how to turn your client’s social or environmental initiative into a wonderful piece of creativity, just see how this year’s New Blood Award winners have done it.
From an ingenious way for football fans to use fewer plastic cups, to a recut of English literature for Black British readers and a watch that helps counter a just-in-time world, the 2021 winners show us that purposeful creativity can be more than good – it can be great.
Despite the many challenges the last year has put in the way of the next generation of creative talent, these audacious and delightful designs and campaigns point to an increasingly conscious and responsible future for our industry, and should give us all plenty of reasons for hope.
Winners: Gareth C E, Jack Walsh, Osagie Samuel (School of Communication Arts 2.0)
From bold concept to perfect name, to deft curation, to bewitching creation, I challenge any creative anywhere to answer this brief better. “Lobby these government idiots/To get these books on the syllabus.”
Winners: India Penny, Conor Hamill (School of Communication Arts 2.0)
If it’s OK to put health awareness communication in mosques (I confess I don’t know), then an approach that allows fellow prayer goers to spot melanoma marks on the feet of other prayer goers is as practical as it is ingenious.
Winners: Mathilde Ytzen Stausholm, Magnus Adrian Rosleff, Anders Rosenvinge, Cecilie Timm, Alberte Wanting (Reklamelinjen, Copenhagen)
Who knew that alcohol plus football could produce something so simple, sassy and smart? A brilliant product-based environmental idea that every football club in the world should adopt right now.
Winner: Chung Leong Lim (Malaysia)
A simple concept – the idea of waste transmuting into monsters, and recycled phones transmuting into cash – helped along by wonderful and ridiculously accomplished animations that wouldn’t be out of place in the professional awards.
Winners: Mica Helger, Ester Wikström (Ravensbourne University)
I’m not entirely sure whether this can actually work, but I love the audacity of the idea. Celebrate procrastination as an important means of consideration and exploration, and reconfigure a watch – basically reconfigure time itself – to allow procrastination to happen.