Hato unveils user-drawn doodles for D&AD Festival 2018 identity

Design agency Hato has unveiled a dynamic new campaign for D&AD that sees colourful community-created drawings across the company’s various media. The designs are featured in 3D animations, posters and OOH advertising for this year’s D&AD Festival, a creative advertising and design festival that opens today (Tuesday 24 April) in London.

The bright and playful doodles can be produced on the website Start with a Mark, which was launched by design studio Hato and D&AD in January to give users access to the necessary tools. The site also allows users to upload their creations to a collaborative online gallery. Since launching the site, Hato has seen over 10,000 visitors, 4,500 marks and 1,300 submissions. To celebrate D&AD Festival 2018’s opening, Hato has launched an updated Start with a Mark AR tool that will make users’ doodles come to life in a “real world” 3D environment.

The final campaign incorporates the user-drawn designs alongside black type set in ITC Franklin Gothic Book. Hato has used different colour palettes depending on the application. For example, the New Blood Awards designs are red, green and blue while the D&AD ceremony is made up of black and gold imagery.

“For the festival campaign, the art direction showcases individual abstract marks that all come together for the event,” says Ken Kirton, Hato’s co-founder and creative director. “Each of these are treated as an artwork, blown up as large as possible within the deliverable and never cropped. The digital tool we designed recorded each drawing in three dimensions; this allowed us to rotate, re-animate and apply textures to the marks for each deliverable. This unique system enabled Hato to produce an extremely flexible and powerful campaign.”