D&AD has unveiled the theme and identity for D&AD Festival 2020: ‘Imagine everything’. The theme encapsulates the ambition and scope of this year’s event: a global festival celebrating creativity – exploring how it shapes culture and helps industries and businesses innovate and grow in the face of disruption.
Patrick Burgoyne, CEO of D&AD says: “This year’s theme, ‘Imagine everything’, reflects D&AD’s ambition to be an international platform that inspires and challenges both leading lights and emerging talent to push the boundaries of creativity. Our aim is to be a place for active engagement and a fertile ground for disruptive ideas, whether that means showcasing creative talent at the cutting edge of their discipline or exploring the power of creativity to address broader issues like the climate emergency, social injustice, the future of commerce and the growing influence of artificial intelligence.”
“Creativity drives innovation and we’re excited to be working with D&AD. As part of the festival The Guardian will be bringing together some of media’s most inspiring thinkers in specially curated sessions to examine how we can harness creativity to build and deliver value in an environment of constant disruption.” – Hamish Nicklin, Chief Revenue Officer, Guardian News & Media.
The initial concept for ‘Imagine everything’ came out of a series of workshops held between teams at D&AD, The Guardian and Dutch branding agency Studio Dumbar. Studio Dumbar then developed the brand identity and design language for the festival.
Liza Enebeis, Creative Director at Studio Dumbar explains: “Our purpose with this project was to engage and amaze. We wanted to find a way to encapsulate the limitless possibilities that creative excellence offers; ‘Imagine everything’ does that. It’s a starting point, like the beginning of a sentence, and allows you to create an engaging campaign by opening up a question: faced with a blank canvas, what can you imagine?”
Liza continues: “We selected the Marfa font by Swiss foundry Dinamo, a variable font that can contract, expand and accommodate very wide application. It acts as a physical representation of the endless possibilities that the mind can imagine, as well as the festival’s ambition to stimulate and broaden the minds of its visitors.”
By opening up limitless possibilities through the design itself, Studio Dumbar has successfully created an identity that by its very nature is inclusive, one of the cornerstones of D&AD.
Patrick adds “D&AD has a broad international reach and is widely respected as a marker of excellence, fairness and diversity. We hope that ‘imagine everything’ becomes a term used as a blank canvas, and that creatives from around the world fill in the gaps of what they want to imagine for themselves, for their communities, for their countries, for the world, and to share these ideas in the lead up to and at the Festival next May.”
D&AD Festival will run 19-21 May at the Old Truman Brewery in London. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of D&AD’s New Blood programme, the Festival will feature a programme of events dedicated to emerging talent. As part of D&AD’s mission to support and nurture emerging talent, attendees on a full pass are invited to bring a young creative under 25 for free. The Festival further delivers on its objective to be more accessible and inclusive through the introduction of a ‘Sharer’ pass, one that openly allows up to three people to attend the Festival on one pass, split across the three days.
Passes can be purchased, with 20% off through 19 December, at dandad.org/festival
About D&AD
Since 1962, D&AD has been inspiring a community of creative thinkers by celebrating and stimulating the finest in design and advertising. The D&AD Awards are recognised globally as the ultimate creative accolade, entered and attended by the best from around the world.
But it’s much more than just awards. Members join a vibrant global community, whilst creatives and clients are inspired by a world-class training programme and the annual D&AD Festival.
As a non-profit advertising and design association, all D&AD’s surpluses go straight into programmes such as New Blood and Shift, inspiring the next generation of creative talent and stimulating the creative industry to work towards a fairer more sustainable future.
About the 2020 D&AD Festival
D&AD Festival is an immersion in creative excellence for the global creative industries, taking place at The Old Truman Brewery from 19 – 21 May 2020. We present three days of inspiring stories, exchanges, masterclasses and exhibitions, through the lens of our five Conversations:
- Imagine joining forces
- Imagine unleashing talent
- Imagine reinventing commerce
- Imagine progressing humanity
- Imagine brilliance
D&AD Festival will feature an exhibition of the work entered in the 2020 D&AD Awards. The winners will be announced on the final day of the Festival. Further details about the Awards, including new categories, will be unveiled in December 2019.
In 2020, we will celebrate the 40th anniversary of D&AD New Blood, a programme of events, awards and learning that creates opportunities for emerging talent to stand up, stand out and flourish. The Festival, along with all D&AD products and services, is used to fund New Blood. To make the Festival more accessible to emerging talent, every attendee can bring along a young creative under 25 for free.
The Festival further delivers on its objective to be more accessible and inclusive through the introduction of a ‘Sharer’ pass, one that openly allows up to three people to attend the Festival on one pass, split across the three days. Under the Sharer pass, each day, a young creative under 25 can come for free with whichever professional is attending on that day.
Speaker fees
D&AD is a charity that puts its surpluses back into the industry we serve.
We pay a base, flat fee of £150 to all speakers, panellists and selected other participants in our Festival.
In exceptional circumstances we reserve the right to supplement this fee. These circumstances include, inter alia, situations where the participant earns their living from speaker fees, additional T&A costs and marketing considerations.
About Studio Dumbar
Studio Dumbar (part of Dept) is an international branding agency specialised in visual identity and motion design. The studio attracts talents from around the world. Their portfolio encompasses work for a variety of clients – from business and government to cultural and non-profit. The drive of the studio is to make outstanding work. Pure. Simple. Powerful.
About The Guardian
Guardian News & Media (GNM) publishes theguardian.com, one of the world’s leading English-language newspaper websites. Traffic from outside of the UK now represents around two-thirds of the Guardian’s total digital audience. In the UK, GNM publishes the Guardian newspaper six days a week, first published in 1821, and the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, The Observer.
The Guardian is renowned for its agenda-setting journalism including, most recently, the Paradise and Panama Papers investigations as well as the Pulitzer Prize and Emmy-winning NSA revelations.
