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Sunday, 8 October 2006 | Levent OZLER
Winners of 2006 Y Design Awards Announced
The results of the inaugural Y Design Awards were announced on Monday night in the trendy, urban setting of the Truman Brewery. The Y Design Awards has been established to recognise and celebrate the UK's leading creative talent demonstrated through the use of digital technology.
The awards received almost 300 submissions, with many of the top 50 digital design agencies being represented. In honour of the technology's 10th anniversary, this year's award scheme centred on Macromedia Flash by Adobe, the design industry's most advanced authoring environment for Best creating interactive websites, digital experiences & mobile content.
Winners of the first nine categories were selected by a panel of five expert judges: William Knight, director at The London Design Festival; Mike Downey, senior product manager for Flash at Adobe; Dan Sutherland, CEO at Carrenza; Guy Watson, MD at Flashguru.co.uk and Chris Walker, director at Saatchi Interactive.
The tenth award, the People's Choice, was chosen by the online community from the Awards' finalists - over 4,000 votes were placed during the week.
The winners of the Y Design Awards were as follows:
Best Game Design: David Beckham Academy Touran Challenge
Agency: Tribal DDB London
Client: Volkswagen UK
Website: http://www.touran-dba.co.uk
Lead designer: Pete Williams
This campaign was designed to strengthen the position that 'Touran is a car for active families' and to promote the competition to win a place at the David Beckham Academy. With only 45 minutes of David's time, Tribal DDB managed to capture enough video footage to create three simple games in which players can interact with the virtual David, either controlling his movements or training against him. It has been described as devilishly challenging and addictive!
Best Interactive Site: Mini aveaword
Agency: glue London
Client: Mini
Website: http://www.aveaword.com
Lead designer: Leon Ostle
Despite selling out of the new model of the Mini Cooper S before it was launched, the manufacturer wanted to reinforce the car's leaner, meaner, and altogether more manly, positioning. glue used 3D modelling and thousands of graded clips which were brought together dynamically in Flash to cover a vast database of responses. It delivers a personalised video to the user's friends, mocking them for not being manly enough - a hilariously funny, viral piece of digital design.
Best Application: Discover Pirate Island on Google Earth
Agency: Digital Outlook
Client: Buena Vista International
Website: http://www.DiscoverPirateIsland.com
Lead designer: Dino Burbidge
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is the second cinematic instalment of the hugely successful Pirates of the Caribbean. Digital Outlook arranged a partnership between Buena Vista International and Google to create DiscoverPirateIsland.com. Through Google Earth, users can see and interact with Pirate Island, shaped like the skull and torches of the film, and set amongst the other islands of the Caribbean. The site demonstrated excellent engagement and generated tremendous interest and positive word-of-mouth.
Best Online Campaign By An Agency With 5 Employees Or Less: How does your garden grow?
Agency: TAMBA Internet
Client: Chris Beardshaw
Website: http://www.growingforlife.org/game
Lead designer: Stuart Howarth / Jeremy Rider
To promote BBC TV presenter Chris Beardshaw, TAMBA was tasked with developing an original game that would be fun as well as educational about the world of horticulture. It had to appeal to a wide audience from school age children through to over 50s hobby gardeners. Users take control of CyberChris and work their way through increasingly difficult levels, each of which is a different environment - from growing tomatoes in a greenhouse to a tulip garden in Holland!
Best Online Campaign By An Agency With More Than 5 Employees: Royal Marines Recruitment
Agency: glue London
Client: Royal Marines
Website: http://www.gluelondon.com/awards/2006/CDA/marines
Lead designer: Leon Ostle
Due to the advanced levels of fitness, initiative and determination, a career in the Royal Marines is unsuitable for the vast majority - thus its recruitment strap-line "99.9% need not apply". glue was tasked to bring to life the spirit of the successful strap-line using the unique and interactive nature of the Internet. The site aims to provoke users into testing themselves for marine suitability. All pieces were created using digital photography, audio and video recorded in the agency and treated to enhance the feeling of sweat, dirt and mental stamina. The result is both absorbing and adrenaline-fuelled.
Not-For-Profit Campaign: Talk to FRANK
Agency: Profero
Client: COI/Home Office/Department for Education & Skills/Department of Health
Website: http://www.profero.com/frank_aug06
Lead designer: Ian Cassidy
FRANK is a free and confidential source of unbiased information about drugs. The 'mess with your mind' campaign created by Profero on behalf of the COI aims to reach out to its target audience of 11 to 18 year olds with a wide array of issues including mental, physical and social side-effects of cannabis and class A drugs. To engage their youthful target audience, the advertisements use video and audio of real life characters in real locations... with an interesting twist!
Best Viral Campaign: Freekick Fusion
Agency: Inbox Digital
Client: Gillette
Website: http://www.freekickfusion.com
Creative director: Oli Christie
Gillette approached Inbox Digital to create a viral football game that reflected the brand identity and would drive traffic to Boots' microsite. The agency developed a freekick game that was clean and stylish achieving over 2 million hits in just a few weeks. It also included a multi-player aspect through its ten lobbies worldwide, supporting up to 300 people concurrently. Players are challenged to score as many free kicks as possible using skill, accuracy and control and to master progressively harder levels. It's plain and simple, good clean fun!
Best Video: Gangs of London
Agency: Mook
Client: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe
Website: http://www.gangsoflondonsp.com
Lead designer: Jon Mallison
'Gangs of London' is the latest PlayStationPortable title from the development studio behind the successful 'The Getaway' franchise. Available from the first of September, it offers gamers the chance to explore an accurate model of central London while engaging with over 60 gangland action missions. Mook's vision was to capture the game's central proposition: 'conquer criminal London whilst waiting for the bus'. Each site visit begins with a video of a young man approaching and then sitting down in a street scene before taking out and switching on his PSP. As he plays the game, the mayhem created in the game manifests itself in the street scene. A comic book blows into shot and viewer zeros in on it, transitioning from the real world in to the game world. So begins the exploration of Gangs of London... Users can explore the site sections by flipping between the pages of a 3D comic and sub-sections by moving around the page and focusing on different frames.
Best Technical Achievement: Discover Pirate Island on Google Earth
See winner of Best Application above
People's Choice For Best Use of Flash: Their Past Your Future
Agency: Rufus Leonard
Client: Imperial War Museum
Website: http://www.theirpast-yourfuture.org.uk/ser...show/nav.00n00h
Lead designer: Tim Wong
Rufus Leonard was approached by The Imperial War Museum to create a complimentary website to support its UK-wide education programme and touring exhibition entitled 'Their Past Your Future'. The programme was funded through the Big Lottery Fund to commemorate and explore issues around the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and its impact on people and places across the UK. In order to create compelling interactivity, the agency enabled the visitor to become a virtual museum visitor, using physical artefacts, letters, diaries and photographs from the exhibition to piece together historical events and personal stories. Rufus Leonard included specially commissioned films on the site, mixing modern day interviews with archive footage, as well as a range of images and objects from the collections of the Imperial War Museum. The result is a highly successful educational tool for learners of all ages that takes history out of the museum and makes it available to anyone with an Internet connection.
Dan Sutherland, CEO at Carrenza, organisers of the Awards, commented: "We were overwhelmed by the number of submissions and we're extremely grateful to the technical design community for embracing the awards with such enthusiasm. The Y Design Awards has identified some highly creative pieces of digital work and captured the variety of ways in which people can use, view and interact online. And there were many more pieces of work, aside from the winners, that were highly commendable. We look forward to next year's awards and the opportunity to celebrate again the hard work, vision and innovation demonstrated by the UK's digital design teams."
The Y Design Awards was supported by The London Design Festival. It was sponsored by Adobe, in association with Carrenza, a specialist managed hosting provider for the design industry. New Media Age magazine, the UK's only weekly magazine covering the business of interactive media, was the lead media partner, alongside Internet World, the UK's largest B2B internet event, and The FWA (Favourite Website Awards), an industry recognised web awards program.
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