An Interview with the duo behind the winning entry in Penguin's D&AD New Blood Awards by Klaudia Hanssen
A still from the Find Your Character entry.
The D&AD New Blood Awards is a yearly competition celebrating advertising, design, digital, and marketing creatives. The main goal of the competition is to help students, recent graduates and emerging creatives get a job or gain exposure in the industry.
This year’s brief for the Penguin 2021 D&AD New Blood Awards set up the challenge of ‘reimagine the role of books, reading and authors for secondary school students in the UK (11–18-year-olds) and enable young adults to engage with a wider range of books and authors who reflect a diverse and inclusive society.’ The participants were free to interpret the brief as long as their submission used books and authors to bring to life the joy of learning through a more diverse range of perspectives.
Alasdair ‘Ali’ Munro and Jimmy Nicholls both graduated from Falmouth University’s Creative Advertising MA last year, and in the time since, they decided to enter Penguin’s 2021 D&AD New Blood Competition. Their entry, an app called Find Your Character, makes it possible for the reader to create characters they want to see in novels. The reader can create their desired characters through the app, which then analyses their creation and matches them with book recommendations that best reflect the characteristics of the character they have designed.
Ali and Jimmy’s entry received a White Pencil Award, which is one of the top awards in the competition. The White Pencil Award is given to entries that have the power to spread a positive change.
I spoke to Ali and Jimmy about their experience working on their winning entry for the Penguin brief for the 2021 D&AD New Blood Competition.
What was your thought process when deciding on how to make Find Your Character?
The brief wanted participants to find ways to reignite young people's passion for reading. They believe young people are becoming disillusioned with books mainly because the school curriculum lacks diversity. Basically - everything is written by old white guys.
Our thought process started by imagining ourselves back in school, figuring out what we liked doing, what excited us, and the books we enjoyed. We had quite a few ideas. But we landed on FYC, completely unplanned. We talked about gaming and character creation and how we both enjoyed designing characters that resembled us. We're both mixed race, and we realised it was one of the few times we got to see people that looked like us in stories. So, we took that thought literally: why don't we let young people design who they want in books?
How was it to work on a brief for Penguin Random House?
The brief was great, it was a specific problem, but it allowed for any creative interpretation. And Penguin is a great brand to work on. Their mission to spread the written word is something we both care about.
Did the current pandemic push the schedule of production or delivery of Find Your Character?
In good and bad ways, we worked remotely on the whole thing. We couldn't access any resources like a recording studio for the voice-over, and we had to draw the video frame by frame on Photoshop. Although the plus side, we could knuckle down without any major FOMO.
Do you think that the Find Your Character video would have been made if issues relating to the diversity of POC, as well as BLM, were not as prominent in recent times as they are?
Yes and no. BLM brought issues like this to the fore. It's forced many institutions to take a hard look at themselves, including the English curriculum. Although this idea was born from our own experiences separate from that of the BLM movement, we might not have had to address it if it wasn't for the activism that brought it to people's attention.
If you want to find out more about Find Your Character, click the link below https://www.dandad.org/awards/new-blood/2021/penguin/3916/find-your-character/
If you want to find out more about the work of Jimmy and Ali, click here https://jimandali.co.uk
Words by Klaudia Hanssen
Image from the Find Your Character entry
Edited by Emily Gough