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Insights

The Big Reveal

25th May 2016

On the 25th May 2016 we held ‘The Big Reveal’ at The Dean Hotel where we relaunched Campaign, announced the 2016 ICAD Awards Nominations and launched our new website.

First up to Campaign. It’s fair to say the night was 53 years in the making. Between 1959 and 1963, ICAD published Campaign: the journal of the Institute of Creative Advertising and Design. Received to critical acclaim at home and abroad, the publication presents an unrivalled snapshot of Advertising and particularly Graphic Design’s early formative years in Ireland and highlights the issues being discussed. During those four years a total of eleven issues were produced quarterly and were edited by Bernard Share and Isolde Farrell with issue 11 being published in June 1963. 53 years later in May 2016 we finally launched issue 12 after something of a hiatus.

We must thank many people for their involvement. Thank you to our editors Mary Ann Bolger and Elaine McDevitt for all their hard work and for making Issue 12 happen, for their editorial assistance thank you to Oran Day, Aidan Dowling, Lisa Godson, Pearse McCaughey and Gavin O’Sullivan. A huge thank you to Oran and David at Atelier David Smith for designing this new issue of Campaign. Atelier have recently also designed our 2015 Awards Book and we thank them for all their recent work with us – they are creating a legacy of absolutely beautiful ICAD publications and books. For her photography we thank Aisling McCoy and Print Media Services for print. Finally, relaunching Campaign simply wouldn’t have been possible without the generous funding from ID2015 and in particular we would like to thank Alex Milton and Karen Hennessy.

We plan to issue Campaign annually to help sate the appetite for intelligent and sound discourse and critical thinking in the fields of advertising and design, both local and international.

On the evening we also announced that the 2016 ICAD Awards Commendations are now live on our website. For nearly 60 years the ICAD Bell has remained a prestigious and coveted prize within Ireland’s creative community and with 700 entries this year it is clear that the ICAD bell is just as coveted today as it was in our early years. As we launch this year’s commendations we have here tonight one of the ICAD bells awarded at our very first awards ceremony in 1965. We look forward to opening the doors of Vicar Street next Thursday night, the 2nd June, to hand out this years bells carrying on our long tradition of rewarding creative excellence. We’re absolutely delighted to announce that we have a high level of nominations and bells this year. Our judging weekend was held in late May and our judging panels made up of esteemed creatives both local and international commented on the extremely high standard this year. That has resulted in a total of 254 pieces of commended work that we proudly launched on our new website – you can view the commended work here. Please do join us to celebrate at our awards night next week, you can buy your tickets online or through the ICAD office.

Finally, we launched our new website. It was important to us to update our website for a whole variety of reasons – to promote our industry, to create a place where our community could interact online, to promote our events and make them easy to book, to allow you to find out about and enter the awards, browse award-winning work from yesteryear, to allow the next generation of creative talent to find out about our learning opportunities – and a whole host of other reasons besides. Redesigning our online presence also allowed us to think about who we are as an organisation and reimagine it for today and who we want to be in the future. As we launch the first phase of our new site we also look forward to the launch of phase 2 which will see the launch of a shop, the full awards archive and most importantly a member area where you can log in update your membership online and maintain your member profile on the site. We hope to grow and develop this part of the site over the years and make the site a real hub for our members to interact and communicate online.

In order to begin to grow our online community we will be in touch with all of our members by email in the coming weeks to encourage you to log into the new site and add your member profile which will involve adding a profile image, bio, contact information and details of your ICAD participation. The site will automatically pull through your ICAD commended and winning work to create a vibrant profile for each member online. We encourage you to interact with and participate in the site and to get involved in ICAD to play your part. In the very wonderful words of Des Kavanagh…

ICAD is not an idea. It is not a place. It is not a ceremony. It is not a series of events. ICAD is its people. It is what they make it. Not that they exist. There is no them. They are us. And if you are a member so are you.

 
Photography on the night by Stephen Scully. Video by Cian McCaughey