Antonios Jansen-Gessas has been awarded the Art Directors Club’s Bronze Nail for his design for a new corporate identity for the city of Wesel.
Every year, the Art Directors Club for Germany (ADC) e.V., an association of 700 leading figures in creative communication, organises the ADC Competition and the ADC Junior Competition. The members work in the communication disciplines of design, digital, editorial, film and sound, spatial communication and advertising, as well as in research and teaching. A jury comprising high-profile designers assesses the submitted entries across a wide range of categories. The awards are presented at the ADC Festival, Germany’s largest gathering of the communications industry. The ADC Junior Competition ranks amongst the most important creative competitions in Europe. It offers up-and-coming creatives a first-class opportunity to draw attention to their work. Junior students may enter the competition with semester projects, final-year projects or practical work in the main categories: Experimental Design, Communication Design, Craft, Digital Media, Audiovisual Communication and Editorial. Each entry may only be submitted once.
At this year’s ADC Festival, Antonios Jansen-Gessas received the Bronze Nail in the Communication Design – Corporate Design/Identity category for his semester project, a commendation from the jury for an exceptionally creative piece of work. As a student on the Bachelor’s degree programme in Information and Communication Design, he had designed a new corporate identity for the city of Wesel as part of a student competition supervised by Professor Christoph Zielke, Professor of Media Design. Out of a total of 35 entries, Jansen-Gessas’s idea was chosen as the winner, and he subsequently submitted it to the ADC Junior Competition.
The Bronze Nail award is all the more impressive given that, as a rule, entries submitted to this category of the ADC Junior Competition are for fictional clients, where designers enjoy far greater creative freedom. Jansen-Gessas’ entry, however, was created specifically in collaboration with the City of Wesel. This involved taking the client’s requirements into account, and attention to detail played a key role. Every aspect of the design had to be functional and practical, and it had to be feasible to implement in the long term within a limited budget. Furthermore, the work was intended to prove its worth in the City of Wesel’s day-to-day communications. “I am delighted to receive this award. It shows me that I made absolutely the right choice in selecting my degree programme, not least thanks to the varied curriculum but also to the excellent teaching,” emphasises Jansen-Gessas.
