The Department of Graphic Design at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) made their mark during Loeries Creative Week 2018, winning gold in the student category. The 40th anniversary of the Loeries, was hosted in Durban on Saturday, 18 August 2018. These are awards focused on the advertising industry covering professional and student creative talent from Africa and the Middle East. The awards cover many categories of television, radio and print including brand communication, graphic design, architecture, direct marketing and digital media.
Across six categories, 150 Loeries were awarded, including 3 Grands Prix, 16 Golds, 39 Silvers, 64 Bronzes, 9 Craft Golds and 19 Craft Certificates.
UJ’s Ronel Irvine, 3rd year Design student; Palesa Tsele, Honours in Strategic Communication; Kristen Landsberg, Honours in Strategic Communication designed a creative indoor poster for a proudly South African brand- Safety Matches. The collaboration campaign amongst the three students was entitled: “Ignite Memories”.
The lecturers involved was Christa van Zyl and Roela Hattingh, who assisted on the project collaboration.
“The campaign was for a Proudly South African brand, in this case Lion Safety Matches. The award was specifically for the range of South African multi-lingual indoor posters, each focussing on a specific South African issue where matches would be used, for example during load shedding, studying by candlelight, learning to cook on a gas stove or celebrating Heritage day with a braai,” said Ms Christa van Zyl, Lecturer: Graphic Design.
“The brief was to work with the concept of memories, hence the campaign slogan, Reignite Memories, was developed,” explained Ms Van Zyl.
Sentiments from the students:
“It was a new and interesting experience working on a project that required collaborating across faculty and disciplines. It gave me an idea and sense of what it would be like in industry when Strat teams and creatives work alongside one another”, said Ronel Irvine.
“When we were tasked with a lovemarks assignment, we went through several brands trying to decide on the best one to work on and Lion Matches stood out. Through our research, we discovered that Lion has been around for decades and it has played a vital role in numerous sentimental moments be it christenings, family gatherings, parties, social movements and many more, therefore that insight revealed that this brand had the a beautiful element of nostalgia and how it has been a role player in making and remembering memories,” said Palesa Tshele.
We realized the importance of integration and inclusion. Throughout this course there has been so much importance put on societal participation and creating messages that are directed at the audience for their understanding. We agreed that culturally there were moments that we could translate into a language appropriate for the directed audience but done in a way that everyone would still be able to appreciate and understand,” said Kristen Landsberg.
The Loeries Creative Week is an annual event that rewards and inspires both innovation and relevance across all spheres of the brand communication industry in Africa and the Middle East.
