ABIS Studio
Bruce Duckworth is the Co-Founder and Co-Chairman of Turner Duckworth, the multi-award winning international brand identity design firm he founded with David Turner in 1992. A designer by trade, Duckworth put an emphasis on the Design in D&AD during this presidency in 2016-17. Here, he recalls his year spent emphasising the D in D&AD.
One of the strange things about our industry is how specialised it is. How thinly sliced it is, into different disciplines – all those categories in the D&AD Annual. Strange because creativity is really about breaking out of boxes, and slices, about trying new things, and about what happens when unfamiliar things come together. But nevertheless we find ourselves in specialisms. Getting better and better at what we do until one day, if we are lucky, we find ourselves with a D&AD pencil of some colour. Maybe even with the D&AD presidency.
It was an honour and a privilege to find myself president of D&AD. And in my presidency, naturally, I wanted to champion my specialism: design. The D in D&AD. For good reason – design, done well, is the unskippable, inherently social, and central power behind today's brands. The stuff that brands become famous for. So I wanted to get people excited about design, and put it in the spotlight. D&AD was, after all, started by designers.
“I wanted to get people excited about design”
But what I experienced during my year as president changed my perspective on creativity. I found myself rubbing shoulders with all manner of creative people from other specialisms, other slices. People from different worlds, from across the world. People at the top of their game. People at the beginning of their creative journey, full of wide-eyed enthusiasm. All working tirelessly to find interesting, original solutions to their briefs. And create something that might, one day, be a D&AD pencil winner.
As President I introduced these people to the stage at the D&AD Festival, spoke at length to them during judging, and interviewed them on stage and after their lectures. I got to meet them formally and chat to them informally. And to do all this as well I could, I spent time learning about their work, and their specialist world of creativity. It was an eye opener and a mind opener.
For years I’d had my head down working in my own discipline. The presidency – and D&AD as a whole – presented an opportunity to lift it up and look around at the infinite variety of the creative world. Bursting with ideas and groundbreaking work. The mediums are different but all creative people are the same in one way: they really only care about one thing, the work
“The presidency – and D&AD as a whole – presented an opportunity to lift it up and look around at the infinite variety of the creative world.”
In days gone by, my reaction to the D&AD Annual landing on my desk had been to look to the categories that I had entered my work into and see what had won. Then I’d flick through the pages looking at things that caught my eye from other categories. But if I'm honest I was skimming the surface. Being president changed that. During my year as president I knew all the work, intimately, from Book Design to Creativity for Good, to Film Advertising to Product Design. The diversity and quality of the work was inspirational.
I thought I knew all about creativity before I was president. But what I knew about was my specialist part of design. Being president was an opportunity to see creativity as a whole, to see the slices disappear. And to open my creative mind.