D&AD 2001 THE YEAR OF DESIGN.(design and art direction awards)(Brief Article)(Column)

Mother is the only agency to pick up a Gold award as design dominates judging at the 2001 D&AD Awards. Peter Soutar assesses the winners and applauds the revised system of judging

Okay, so I'm standing in the middle of the room where the D&AD Gold jury meets, surrounded by all the work that has been nominated for a Silver.

My overwhelming priority, apart from making an informed and considered choice, of course, is not to make a fool of myself in front of my peers. I am the new president elect of D&AD and therefore not at home to Mr Cockup.

Unfortunately, Mr Cockup has his own front door key.

We have an hour to look in detail at any work with which we are not familiar. I make for the direct mail table where the entries, a selection of imaginative 3D items, are spread out on yellow cards and being examined by my fellow jury members. I pick up the only free objects, which are a subtly adapted pack of cigarettes and a red lighter. On closer examination, I can see that the typography is a faithful reproduction of that found on an ordinary pack of ciggies but I can't find the selling message so I move on to search for it in the redlighter.

"It's up for a pencil so there must be something fiendishly clever here somewhere," I say to myself. At this point I realise that I am not the only person talking to me. "Can I have my fags back, please?" a fellow juror asks.

As well as discovering at least one idiot in the room, the jury also found four Gold pencils. The only advertising Gold went to Mother for its stunning Britart campaign, which capped a brilliant year at D&AD for London's finest young agency. Their ingenuity and raw creativity got them prizes for everything from TV campaigns to Christmas card-websitey things. If I were much younger and poorer I'd be banging on their door right this minute trying to get any kind of job going. D&AD don't do an agency of the year but if we did, Mother would have won it by a mile.