The D&AD Awards — 2022 Exhibition in Japan was held at the Ad Museum Tokyo. Our brief was to develop a design concept that reflected the outstanding creativity of the previous year’s D&AD award winners, and to create posters, movies, and thematically linked decor for the exhibition venue. Our objective was not only to generate interest in advance of the event, but also to heighten the exhibition experience by providing attendees with a visually engaging and thematically coherent context in which to view the works.

In our art direction, we sought to give visual expression to the mindset of the design process. Taking bioluminescent jellyfish as our motif, we placed them in the “deep sea” of a black background and used subtly feathered layers of white to render the jellyfish’s body as a series of complex overlapping geometric forms. This not only replicated the ethereal and delicate structure of jellyfish, it evoked the gentle drifting motion they exhibit in their natural habitat. Contrasting sharply with these monochromatic elements, we used bright spot colours to depict points of light that represent both the spark of design inspiration and the stinging and shocking sensation that jellyfish tentacles can produce. In the exhibition space, we reproduced our design on thin, gauzy curtains to mimic the movement of jellyfish, and created a series of “deep sea zones” in which selected examples of the award-winning works could be viewed.