Mark Bonner is a Strategic Brand Creative working in partnership with world-famous brands, including Virgin Galactic, Neon Adventures and Hummel. He served as D&AD’s 52nd President in 2015 after working as a board member for four years. Here, he reflects on a year of More Lectures, New Pencils and a Shift towards our first Festival.
The year started for me with a luke-warm pizza in a Fulham restaurant with then Chairman Dick Powell. “Mark, how do you feel about being the 52nd President of D&AD?”
“Blimey, now I’m in trouble,” I remember thinking.
The truth is, I really wanted it, as I had been on the board for four years and had really got to grips with working for D&AD. It has always really mattered to me, especially because of its unique altruism towards education. My own studio was going great guns and It was a good time to be involved, I think. Dick Powell was a wise and charismatic Chairman, Tim Lindsay had taken over as CEO and Dara Lynch really made the place tick as COO. They were a formidable trio and we had some great people on the board. Two spring to mind as being inspirational to me: Neville Brody (who had surprised me by being not only a great guy to work with but one who really threw a lot of himself into D&AD strategy, defining D&AD as a virtuous circle of excellence & education), and then there was the legendary Alexandra Taylor, who was always egging me on to take the big job, and her straight-talking was such a voice of reason in there. I had done a lot of work researching the formation of D&AD for its 50th birthday and had interviewed the surviving founders and put the story together properly for the first time. We invited them all to the 50th dinner, and I persuaded D&AD to award Derek Birdsall a unique Honorary Yellow Pencil for his seminal role in the creation of D&AD, as he had, incredibly, never won a Pencil in his formidable creative career as a graphic designer.
“Most importantly, we worked to define the first D&AD Festival, where we planned to gather all D&AD’s judging, exhibition and events together in one big bang”
Around this time, we were also plotting a move from our tired offices in Hanbury Street and I was working on the early thinking behind amplifying D&AD’s role in education with the D&AD Foundation and the early shape of D&AD Shift, which supports talented aspiring creatives who have not been through a university education to build their careers in the creative industry. Most importantly, we worked to define the first D&AD Festival, where we planned to gather all D&AD’s judging, exhibition and events together in one big bang and really build something annually with our sponsors across a whole week of activity. We believed it could save us money but also to make a far bigger noise by gathering all our best stuff up in one great celebration of creativity at The Truman Brewery in London’s East End.
I have some wild memories of the year, which was a crazy criss-crossing of responsibility with my full-time role as CD at Design Consultancy GBH. I remember getting going with the President's Lecture series first, and asking for a box of D&AD letterheads so I could write to Peter Blake, Banksy, Tyler Bruleé, Damien Hirst, and a bunch of others I’d never get a reply from. I wanted to get the Lectures back on form and make a real dent. We managed a magnificent seven, with Toscani, Calvert and Starck being the headliners, but the one I remember above all was with a human cyborg; a young Spanish-Irish artist who had decided he wanted to add a sixth sense to aid a colour-blindness he’d suffered since birth.
Neil Harbisson had an operation to permanently insert a 10-inch antenna into his skull that could convert colour into vibrations felt inside his inner ear. Watching Neil explain his story on stage was one thing, but walking through Shoreditch with Neil to the Venue whilst the pubs were emptying was something else. I remember Oliviero Toscani bombarding Neil with questions from the front row: “What if the Russians hack you?!” It was quite a night. Later in the year, we rounded off with my old RCA Tutor, Margaret Calvert and then with Philippe Starck at The Shoreditch Town Hall. Calvert was wonderful, enthralling and full of wisdom. Starck was his own irascible, inimitable self, almost out of control with his mischievous humour and a constant threat to the front row.
“Wood and Graphite Pencils were designed after I had fiercely resisted a move towards Gold & Silver”
Simultaneously, we were cooking up a controversial but correct change to the 51-year-old D&AD Pencils. We were going to replace the silly ‘in book’ and nomination ‘slices’ with real Pencils for the first time. Wood and Graphite Pencils were designed after I had fiercely resisted a move towards Gold & Silver. D&AD should never move away from Wood and we should protect the sanctity of Yellow! We stand tall in a forest of semi-precious metal gongs as it is and It was over my dead body that we moved away from Wood, but it was close for a while. The happy problem D&AD had was that we were 5-6 times harder to win than our competitors, and as a result we were losing recognition. By expanding from 3 to 5 Pencils, we went a long way to increasing the number of Pencils on Boardroom shelves, without making them any easier to win.
Kicking judging week off was a focus as I wanted to really set the judges on the right path with a selfless and open mind. I persuaded Mike Dempsey to tell a thoughtful tale about selflessness called ‘Mountain Man’ at a dinner the night before judging began. It’s a wonderful story about a Swiss Graphic Design teacher who liked to remain anonymous by never seeking credit for his work, finding true rewards only in the achievements of his students. I wrote a manifesto which tried to liberate the jurors from politics and preconceptions affecting their judgements. It was nicknamed the ‘Bonifesto’ and big posters proclaimed from the walls as every jury deliberated. I gave a gung-ho kick-off speech each morning as we set more than 200 judges to work. I can still remember the horror on Tim’s face on the final day when he told me we’d got FOUR black Pencils. Personally I wanted the biggest Annual ever, so I thought, f**k it. I was delighted and the work deserved it.
The Annual itself was a hell of a side-project and gave me sleepless nights. I chose Matt Willey and David Pearson as a kind of editorial design dream team, but Matt was moving to work on the New York Times and could only flirt with doing it. David designed a wonderful set of covers which really leveraged what was special about D&AD in my view – Multi-Disciplinary Creativity. We celebrated the Wood of our Pencil Awards in a humble series of FIVE covers – one for each Pencil level – and the Annual broke with tradition amplified the new family of pencils by listing work in alphabetical order by creator not by discipline, in ascending order of merit from Wood, Graphite, Yellow, White to Black Pencil. It made for a liberating firework display of cross-category creativity. Radical and completely relevant – I loved it.
“really wanted to say something about the ridiculous STEM policy and the government’s position on reducing creativity in our schools whilst the costs of further education were increasingly out of reach for many.”
Awards Night was a blur. I can still remember Michael Wolff sharing my dressing room and lying on my sofa like a psychiatrist’s subject, talking about John Deere tractors while I was getting dressed to go on stage. Micheal probably knew he was the perfect distraction from my nerves, but we got so wrapped up talking tractors that I nearly missed my cue to go on. I remember really going for it with my speech as I really wanted to say something about the ridiculous STEM policy and the government’s position on reducing creativity in our schools whilst the costs of further education were increasingly out of reach for many.
The year wrapped with the New Blood Awards. Something incredible happened that night as a mix of passion and relief poured out of me as I let loose and we delivered a raucous, rapturous night for the triumphant young creatives from across the world in a venue that had an energy all of its own. It was a night I’ll never forget. For me, it was the perfect end to a great year. I’d won a Student Pencil myself back in the day and it was just a wonderful, life-affirming night seeing how much a D&AD Pencil meant to these shining stars of tomorrow.
My last work was to get some more strong design voices onto the board right before I left in Jack Renwick and Craig Oldham, as well as a future president in Harriet Devoy. Going back to that analogy of the semi-precious metal gongs for a second, I think we re-defined and differentiated D&AD and got it in great shape that year. A little pruning of some dead wood perhaps and then planting some new trees that I think are bearing a lot of fruit now, six or seven years on.