A team of students from Vega School of Brand Leadership (Vega), bagged a Pencil Award in the prestigious D&AD New Blood Awards for their campaign Better in the Dark.
The win has certainly put South Africa on the map for its outstanding design and innovation. The students have won at the D&AD awards for the second year in a row.
The team was made up of four students in their third year of a BA (Branding) degree. Kate-Lyn Meistre, Kathryn Henning and Mikola Hill are majoring in visual communications, while Jessica van der Berg has chosen copywriting as her primary discipline.
Henning said the win will open doors for their careers and allow them to reach even greater heights.
“We were thrilled to hear that we’d won the award for our integrated campaign. The win will allow us to reach new heights with our creative ideas, changing lives and making the world a better place through innovation design and advertising,” she explained.
The school enters its students’ work into the awards to be judged against other creative, design and advertising students’ work from around the globe.
According to Henning, they received the brief in March this year and they worked to develop a campaign around the notions of bringing colour and light to an area of Johannesburg that would benefit the communities there. With a touch of influence from load shedding, the students came up with a solution that involved colour to provide a lively look and feel to the area.
“Making Yeoville Better in the Dark by using pantone swatches developing the area through glow in the dark colour and bringing back the vibe that Yeoville was once known for, was amazing,” Henning added.
The students are now permitted to use the Pencil icon on their future work, proving to the world that their talent has been endorsed by global industry leaders.
Dr Carla Enslin, co-founder of Vega, said that global recognition of this calibre confirms that the school is succeeding in helping students unearth their true potential, and in turn, shaping and building some of South Africa’s leading young minds to make a lasting impact on the industry in the future.
