With 15 winning entries including top-placing Gold & Silver Pencils, Frank Anselmo’s class of junior and senior BFA Advertising students delivered yet again at the prestigious Young Ones Brief competition, held May 8 as part of the One Club for Creativity’s annual Young Ones Student Awards Ceremony. Not only did the team earn the highest tally of points overall, in competition with students from over 40 international schools, but every member of Anselmo’s Unconventional Advertising class had a winning entry, making it the largest class ever to do so. In total, 21 SVA students placed in the Brief contest.
“This is an incredible accomplishment at the biggest advertising show in the world,” Anselmo, who was ranked as the number one most-awarded professor in the world by One Show, said. “I still can’t believe my class had more winners than any entire school in the world.”
The One Club is a non-profit organization that recognizes creative excellence in advertising and design. For this competition—the student version of industry-important The One Show—entrants responded to three prompts: a client brief, which gave students the opportunity to develop concepts for a leading brand, in this case Sonnet Insurance; a design brief, which asked students to create a poster that unifies communities with a positive image of refugees and migrants around the world; and a social brief, which had students put their ingenuity to use for a cause. This year, the social brief focused on opioid overdose awareness and prevention campaigns.
Eunseok Park and Minjeong Lee won a Gold Pencil for their social Print campaign, “Kills More Than,” which features staggering comparisons between the number of deaths caused by opioids overdoses and, for example, soldiers in the Vietnam War. The duo also took home two merit awards for their client briefs. “I always loved coming up with ideas and making advertising, but I wasn't always fully confident about my work,” said Park. “Winning this award gave me confidence and a strong motivation to work harder.”
Younghoe Koo and Brittany Newman also won gold for the social brief, in the Online/Digital category, with a redesigned, smart prescription bottle that dispenses pills in a regulated manner and communicates with patients’ doctors. In Online/Digital, Sujin Lim and Taekyoung Debbie Park earned a Silver Pencil for their campaign, which uses the auto-population feature of the Google search bar to promote addiction awareness and assistance.
The Young Ones Student Awards highlight exceptional student work from around the world and are divided into three overarching sections: the aforementioned Young Ones Brief, focusing on advertising; the Young Ones ADC, encompassing a wide swath of design projects; and the Portfolio Awards, which honors a student’s submitted body of work. SVA took top honors in all three areas this year, earning more points across the board than any other school in competition.
The Young Ones Art Directors Club (ADC) recognizes college-level creatives in categories ranging from book design to animation, typography to product design to interactive apps. Students submit an individual piece of work from a school assignment or personal portfolio (as opposed to responding to a prompt) and compete in the same disciplines and categories set up for the professional ADC Awards. SVA once again racked up top scores, with 100 winning entries and many projects picking up multiple honors.
The College fared particularly well in Craft in Motion categories, including Animation and Motion Graphics. Kirsten Cho (MFA 2017 Computer Arts), Lemon Sanuk Kim (BFA 2017 Design), Rachel Park Goto (BFA 2017 Design), and Michael Rootare and Jeffrey Meacham (both BFA 2017 Computer Art) all won Gold Cubes for their respective shorts. Cho and Rooter and Meacham’s 3D animated films both tell original stories following a day’s work in quirky, highly automated factories; Kim and Goto created lyrical, stylish visual essays inspired by pieces of social and cultural commentary. Rounding out the Animation awards, Ninaad Kulkarni (MFA 2017 Computer Aart won silver for Kcloc, as did Brian Kelso-Gillespie and Dan West (BFA 2017 Computer Art) for Hirvio; Brandon Tabone took home bronze for Gauntlet (BFA 2017 Computer Art).
Han Jun Kim (BFA 2018 Design) won a Silver Cube in the Interactive category for Education/Reference Apps with Loupe, designed for the American Museum of Natural History. Loupe is a multi-platform visitor interface built around a small, NFC chip-enabled magnifying glass that allows museum-goers to tag and save images and content, acts as an audio and video guide, enables AR experiences, and more.
“My idea was to understand the needs and values of the museum guests, and to combine them with a visitor-centered system and futuristic experience,” says Kim, whose project earned several merit places as well. “I want to continue working not only [to make] good work but also to improve the quality of people's lives.”
Other ADC highlights include:
Double winner Weixi Zeng (BFA 2017 Design) earned silver and bronze in Motion Graphics for “Brutalism Grey” and “1984: Principles of Newspeak,” inspired by the words of Gerhard Richter and George Orwell respectively. Jue Gong (BFA 2017 Design) also won silver in that category for “Too Much of Me.”
Current Advertising student Bowook Yoon’s Direct/Digital Advertising campaign for Citibike won a Bronze Cube, as did Samuel Kim’s (BFA 2019 Design) work in Publication Design, with typography-based book jackets for Jose Mauro de Vasconcelos’ novels.
Finally, Madelene Wikskär (BFA 2019 Design) won gold in the Portfolio competition, with a suite of clever and precise design work that included posters, an LP cover, book covers, chapbooks, and wine bottle packaging.
Congratulations to all the winners!