Keen sponsor D&AD Student Awards

Keen sponsor D&AD Student Awards

Keywords: Awards, Graphic design, Office furniture

Keen is supporting the best of young British design talent by sponsoring the D&AD Graphic Design Student Award this year. As part of its involvement Keen are also responsible for setting the design brief for this category. The winner of the Graphic Design category this year is Jane Hilder of the University of Salford. Winners of all the categories were announced at the prize-giving ceremony on 28 June 2001.

D&AD's Student Awards are the key fixture in the UK college calendar and provides an essential connection between design, advertising, education and business, attracting the best of young designers from across the UK. Winning the coveted Student Yellow Pencil is a springboard for future success. For more than 20 years, the industry has watched D&AD Student Award winners go on to become top creatives.

The awards are part of Keen's realisation of its ambitious agenda for promoting UK based creativity and design in the international office furniture market. The company has also been busy in Japan and the USA, where it furnished the new Apple HQ with Fred Scott's Supporto seating, which this year is joined by a full table and desking system. These join the recently expanded ranges of products now launched from the other designers that they currently work with:Robin Day, Ron Carter, Jane Dillon, Thomas Heatherwick, and Mathias Bengtsson. Keen's graphic designers SEA, who created its identity, were themselves selected for this year's prestigious professional D&AD Annual. Keen's support of the D&AD Student Awards reinforces its belief in' nurturing new British design talent.

The design brief to the students was to create a selection of printed literature to fit into Keen's current format, encompassing all the man elements of the company – its identity, products and designers, whilst reflecting Keen's corporate ethos. The high standard of entries provided a difficult task for the judges, who were Melanie Chan of Keen, Bryan Edmundson of SEA and Martin Cox of Blast.

Martin Cox said of Jane Hilder's winning entry "The winner was one of the few that managed what I considered to be the hardest element of the brief, that of taking on the Keen design ethos, and pushing it on."

The second prize was awarded to Emilia Bergmans of Kingston University, one commendation to Tony Groth and Peter McNally of Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, and seven other entries from colleges across the UK were selected to appear in the D&AD Student Annual.

For further information contact D&AD, Lisa Hirst, Tel: +44 (0) 20 7840 1125; E-mail: lisa@dandad.co.uk. Or contact Louise Gridley, Tel: +44 (0) 20 7840 1124; E-mail: louiseg@dandad.co.uk