Type is the core element in branding: this year's D&AD Type Design Jury president explains

Ever since 1962, D&AD has been inspiring a community of creative thinkers by celebrating and stimulating the finest in design and advertising. This year is no exception. 

Recognised globally as the ultimate creative accolade this year's D&AD 2021 Awards announced key changes across categories which respond to developments in the creative sector and ensure the awards remain reflective of the industry as it evolves. 

Luckily with the ever increasing number of entries, Type Design has been moved from Typography and established as a stand alone category, with the jury awarding the best design of single font styles and font families across all styles and languages. 

Typeroom reached out to Panos Vassiliou, presidents in this year's inaugural D&AD 2021 Awards Type Design Jury on why a Pencil truly matters.

“Winning a D&AD Type Design Award sure elevates one's creative and career path” Vassiliou says. “Competition will be fierce, judging will be strict, but winning a D&AD Pencil could be one of the most defining moments of one's career.” 

Vassiliou along with a team of international design experts such as Daniel Escudeiro, Soulaf Khalifeh, Min-Young Kim, Ksenya Samarskaya, Kris Sowersby, Qian Sun and Jim Sutherland, will select the most visually arresting typeface designs of last year. 

To give you a rundown on how typography affects our buying choices, the psychology behind typo-branding decisions and how type design has become the ultimate star of the visual communications industry, Vassiliou explains more in his insightful and mind-blowing feature “The Type that Makes the Brand.”

“The graphic elements of early times were pictures. Mankind, in its quest to find more efficient ways to communicate, changed the pictures to symbols and later to letters. Those symbols were visual expressions of one's surroundings. The food, the body, one's home became the basis of the alphabet. With this imaginative presentation of the letter, Homo Sapiens projected a picture to the mind of the reader” writes Vassiliou. 

Typefaces acquired the power to change our mood and stimulate certain impulses. But could type also influence our decisions, the ones we believe we make using our own free will?

“A creative selection of the right novelties is enough to elevate the status of a typeface from its pure functional purpose to an essential graphic design element that defines a brand” notes Vassiliou.

“Type design, once an unseen hero, has now become the star of the visual communications industry. When typefaces become part of the brand’s identity, they have a strong impact on how it is perceived, they trigger lasting associations and make your brand speak with a consistent and confident voice. Typefaces may be designed to portray an exciting visual rhetoric that signals a fresh start for an existing brand or an exciting career for a new brand.”

Remember this meme when luxury brands opted out of their iconic logos and went for a more minimalistic word mark design? What’s the psychology behind such typographic changes? Our #TypeDesign Jury President Panos Vassiliou @parachutetype discusses it here: https://t.co/UP41U4xPm8 pic.twitter.com/tAr5EP1rJV

— D&AD (@dandad) February 11, 2021

Read Panos Vassiliou's take on type design and its mood-changing impact here and submit your type designs -including traditional, sans serif, calligraphic, display and multi-style font families- by the deadline on 17 March, 23:59 GMT. 

Have a look at the subcategories and download the entry kit for D&AD 2021 Awards Type Design here.