_14.jpg)
Some of you may remember that we published a digital Annual for the first time last year. And no actual Book. It caused a bit of a kerfuffle – particularly among the design community.
A couple of enterprising young creatives, who had won their first Pencil and were disappointed that this milestone was not going to be immortalised in print, published a bootleg version. They even got my old friend and boss Sir John Hegarty to write the introduction. We couldn’t approve for legal reasons. But we turned a Nelsonian blind eye. (Well done, chaps.)
Some people accused us of not loving books. Not true, we love them as much as anyone and will continue to publish new ones to go along with the Book of Presidents, Rewind and the Copy Book.
And we’ll continue to invite entries into the Book Design category in the D&AD Professional Awards. But without going through the whole rationale in detail again, it really was high time to go beyond the
physical Book.
A significant percentage of entries and Pencil winners are film or digital. A thumbnail in a printed volume is just not a good way to showcase the winning work. And going digital allowed us to
include a breadth and depth of rich content – interviews with makers and jurors, case studies, trend reports and other useful, stimulating, educative stuff.
Furthermore, D&AD is increasingly focused on the global creative community and a "digital first" policy. We love physical events and the opportunity to meet our peers, but if the pandemic has had an upside, it’s the forced realisation that we can deliver great, stimulating content to a global audience.
And, of course, this is how most of the younger members of our community – also an increasingly important priority for us – choose to access our content, products and services.
But an even more compelling reason was that not many people really cared that much about the printed Annual (cue a few howls of disagreement). We printed only a couple of thousand and they went to a mainly older, mainly UK-based audience and adorned a few bookcases, sometimes unopened and unused.
We love our older members, please don’t get me wrong. I am one myself. But it was time to move on, to modernise, to make a richer, better product and (here’s the thing) to make it available to the whole community. For free.
And yes, of course, some things were lost – the opportunity for barking mad cover designs for one. Our Board of Trustees didn’t take the decision lightly.
So what happened? It was a blinding success. The Digital Annual reached 73,746 people of whom 61,975 were coming to
the D&AD site for the first time. There were a total of 451,976 page views (and counting) and an average session time of nearly five minutes – exceptional for this kind of content. Sixteen per cent of the audience were in the 18- to 24-year-old category, meaning we reached more than 12,000 young creative people. And more than 75% of that audience were from outside the UK – the complete reverse of the printed Book.
And in keeping with the D&AD Annual tradition it looked wonderful too, thanks to a great design concept from our friends at Studio Dumbar.
Awards shows are occasionally maligned by some. But if they have a purpose, it’s surely to stimulate and celebrate better work, showcase the very best our industry can produce to the people who buy our services and, perhaps most importantly of all, to challenge, inspire and enable a new generation of creative talent by showing them what it’s possible to achieve – with talent, dedication, craft and hard work.
So, here comes the 2021 Digital Annual. There will still be people who mourn the passing of the Book, and we respect their opinion. But there’s no going back I’m afraid – it’s too important to get the work to the whole of our industry, in a form where it can be properly viewed and enjoyed, for free. D&AD is here to serve the global creative community in the best ways we can, and the Digital Annual is the foundation stone of that service.
In truth, we were flattered by the reaction to the announcement last year, even where there was dissent. It showed that people cared about creative excellence – and about D&AD.
The two young guys who produced the Bootleg Annual were incredibly respectful of our organisation, even in their disappointment, and we appreciated that. As we also appreciated everyone else’s passionately expressed opinions. Keep caring, please. It’s why we do what we do.
I know we haven’t convinced Sir John, though. Not yet.
Tim Lindsay is chairman of D&AD