Since 1962, D&AD has been inspiring a community of creative thinkers by celebrating and stimulating the finest in design and advertising. A D&AD Award is recognised globally as the ultimate creative accolade, entered and attended by the best from around the world.
Inspire your creativity with tools to overcome any creative challengeExplore your creative mindset to better understand your audience, build collaboration skills, and boost your resilience.
Explore the gaming landscape and how your brand fits into itIn the vast industry of gaming, the options are seemingly endless, but the risk of a wrong move is potentially disastrous.On this three-week course from D&AD, you’ll gain an understanding of where you, your brand, or the brief you’re responding to fit into the gaming landscape.Discover the power of the gaming industryIn a rapidly changing and growing industry, it’s crucial to understand the current landscape and what’s on the horizon.You’ll explore the foundations of the gaming industry, understand its history, and identify what’s powered its growth to see how your brand or brief can utilise this media to find the right response.Better understand who a gamer is and how they are your audienceWhether you’re inserting your brand into a game, or being inspired by the power of gaming to enhance an existing experience, knowing the steps your audience will take is vital.Explore who a gamer is, understand the roles of influencers and streamers and learn how brands are interacting with gaming in the right way.Navigate a brand’s place in the gaming worldWhile there are endless options for activations within the gaming world, there is a right time and place for a brand to engage.You’ll explore the different options and audiences, based on your brand or brief, and discover how to create a brief that provides the right information to engage a platform, publisher, or streamer.Learn from experts in the fieldThis course is led by D&AD and features content created by a variety of experts in the field from top companies in the industry such as Twitch and Epic Games.This course is designed for creatives that want to tap into the power of gaming for their communications, marketing, and advertising.Whether you’re a designer, brand builder, or business owner, this course will guide you through how to harness gaming and use immersive storytelling to enhance your audience connection.
Cultivate active and engaged audiences for your brandWhile the audience sits at the heart of any successful communication, the community you build is what supercharges gaming. Often called the new social media, this medium is where people want to interact, engage, and spend their time.On this three-week course from D&AD, you’ll explore how to build and engage a gaming audience, maintain their attention, and empower them to do good.Better understand your audience with creative empathyWhether you’re inserting your brand into a game, or being inspired by the power of gaming to enhance an existing experience, knowing the steps your audience will take is vital.You’ll learn to see the power of games through the eyes of your audience; what’s their character, perspective, and identity, and how does this affect their experience?Explore gamification and how it can improve creative communicationsBy deploying multiple techniques and tools, games successfully create a place where people want to spend their time.On this course, you’ll learn how gamification can enrich your advertising and marketing comms, and how the social aspect of maintaining a community can positively impact all areas of creative communications.Create an authentic audience experienceCreating an authentic experience starts with understanding and empathize with your audience.In this section, you’ll move to the next step and learn how to create an authentic gaming experience based on audience motivations and player types, plus understand the importance of characters and know how to overcome the uncertainty in gaming.Learn from experts in the fieldThis course is led by D&AD and features content created by a variety of experts in the field from top companies in the industry such as Massive Entertainment and Phantom.This course is designed for creatives that want to tap into the power of gaming for their communications, marketing, and advertising.Whether you’re a brand builder, social media executive, or business owner, this course will guide you through how to harness gaming and use immersive storytelling to create a community for your customers.
Explore worldbuilding to engage your audienceBuilding a world that hooks people in, ignites their imagination, and thrills their senses takes time, techniques and brilliant storytelling.On this three-week course from D&AD, you’ll learn to use wordbuilding to explore a gaming world through the eyes of your audience and create experiences that engage them.Build wider communities with transmedia storytellingTo build an experience that’s so encapsulating is down to the skills of many successfully coming together.You’ll explore the craft of building cross-over experiences and how they can spawn fandom as a result. By using creative storytelling and building a compelling narrative, you can develop transmedia experiences to spread your reach and grow your community.Draw creative inspiration from the gaming communityWith the power to cultivate a community, the potential to turn this into a force for good is endless.You’ll explore the endless possibilities and creative inspiration in the gaming space, and how to embed it into the brands you work for and briefs you work on.Learn how to use the skills from the gaming industry in your marketingMoving from the online to offline, IRL worlds, and creating immersive experiences that go beyond a single platform is the holy grail for many creatives.Once you’ve built your knowledge of storytelling, you’ll assess the skills the gaming industry employ in bringing their games to life and see how they can work for your brand across multiple platforms, media, and mediums.Learn from experts in gamingThis course is led by D&AD and features content created by a variety of experts in the field from top companies in the industry such as Epic Games and Massive Entertainment.This course is designed for creatives that want to tap into the power of gaming for their communications, marketing, and advertising.No matter what part of the creative process you handle, this course will guide you through how to harness gaming and use immersive storytelling to enhance your audience connection.
Embed the best of the games industry into your creative communicationsDiscover how to create engaging creative communications, advertising, and experiences by harnessing the power of gaming.
Connect with your target customers and get better results with your workAt the heart of all brilliant, commercial creativity lies people. An end audience who you, as a creative, need to connect with in order for your brilliant ideas to land and get results.This course dives into the head and hearts of humans and will help you understand and build empathy with them.Learn how to research and understand an audienceIt’s vital, especially in creative industries, to understand your customers. With creative work usually needing a lot of time and money to produce and use, missteps can be costly.On this course, you’ll learn the essentials to getting into the minds of an audience and how to obtain and use quantitative and qualitative data to better understand your audience.Develop the tools to build accurate customer journey mapsOnce you know more about your audience, you’ll look at the tools you can use to step into the shoes of your customer. You’ll then learn about customer journey maps and how to apply these tools to build maps of your users’ journeys. This will ultimately help you to develop audience personas that align to your existing customer base.Make an emotional connection with customers through your workEmotions play a big part in both customer decisions and advertising. To be successful with your product, especially in marketing it, you need to create an emotional connection with your audience.You’ll look at how to create campaigns that utilise emotions and make compelling solutions. By the end of this course, you’ll be better equipped to build empathy with your end audience, user, or customer, and produce exceptional creative work that makes an emotional connection.This course is designed for anyone in a creative industry looking to empathise and connect more with their audience.You may be interested if you’re a creative, strategist, marketer, or communicator wanting to better understand your audience.
Understand your role in a team and build team working skillsCreative excellence isn’t a solo activity. It takes the work of a team to produce brilliant commercial creative outcomes.On this course, you’ll learn key skills to understand your role in a team, how best to work with others, and how to make sure you’re collaborating successfully.You’ll also hear from world-class creative professionals on how they foster collaboration in their teams, be inspired by brilliant output, and explore how to apply this to your role.Investigate effective collaboration in creative industriesYou’ll look at what effective collaboration looks like and identify the skills required to successfully collaborate in a team. Then you’ll be able to assess your own skillset to focus on what you need to improve to work better as part of a team.With the working world shifting more towards remote working, it’s important to assess how collaboration differs in a team that’s working from home. This will help you to look at whether there are other collaboration tools you can use to ease the creative process.Explore the importance of a team and positive team dynamicsWhen collaborating with different teams, you’ll experience a mixture of personalities and team dynamics. On this course, you’ll learn how to work best alongside various types of co-worker and the techniques you can utilise to improve team dynamics.Discover how to apply collaboration techniques in different organisationsEvery business and team will have their own dynamic and optimal way of working together. This course will take you through examples of collaboration in different organisations so you can compare and contrast the techniques used. Then you’ll be able to apply these tools to your own situation, making sure you’re collaborating successfully and being more productive because of it.This course is designed for anyone in a creative industry looking to collaborate successfully with people in a team.You may be interested if you’re an early-stage creative wanting to improve your teamwork with other team members, or if you’re a manager looking for techniques to improve collaboration in your team.
We’re D&AD – a global organisation that inspires, celebrates and enables creative excellence worldwide. Discovering and nurturing talent is at the heart of what we do, supporting creatives throughout all stages of their careers.In this course we bring our rich history of awarding and inspiring powerful storytelling in the creative design and advertising industries to show how using a narrative can make your brands and products stand out from the crowd.Join high profile creatives, including Sir Alan Parker, Peter Souter, Gary Hoff and Al MacCuish as they share practical advice about how to create compelling stories that sell products, brands and values.Structured across four weeks, you’ll be given the context of why we use story and guided through how to:Create a narrativeCommunicate a brand through storyEngage your audienceAmplify your message through digitalBoth theory and practical tasks will be supported using examples from D&AD’s extensive archive of award winning creative work.To get ahead of the game, start exploring D&AD’s archive of award winning creative work now.This course is for everyone who wants to understand how storytelling can add value to a campaign. It will be particularly relevant to those studying or already working in the creative industries - specifically advertising, marketing and design.Basic understanding and knowledge of the advertising industry will be helpful.
Become better equipped to handle the pressures of creative workIn today’s world, change is part of everyday life. How you cope with it, overcome it, and roll with the punches is your resilience.This course is aimed at those in creative industries, where there are unique challenges. From client pitches and burn-out to the constant pressure to have brilliant ideas.You’ll understand your purpose, explore vulnerability, and overcome situations that will test your resilience, making you more equipped to handle the pressures of creative work.Understand how the creative process impacts your resilienceThe creative process can often involve challenges that other industries don’t deal with, adding pressure when trying to create your best work.You’ll start by examining the creative process to develop strategies for building your creative resilience in testing situations.Explore vulnerability at work and its relationship with resilienceStrong, supportive teams can help fuel each other’s creative resilience and improve the creative process overall.You’ll look at vulnerability at work, learning some techniques to build resilience with the help of others. You’ll then create a plan to tackle a common challenge for creatives: giving and receiving feedback. Learn when, where, and how to ask for feedback, while being open to the response. Plus, explore how to give constructive feedback that helps build resilience in others.Build resilience by identifying your personal purposeIt’s important to know your purpose in your role. There are different ways to figure out your personal purpose within a team and an organisation.This course will take you through the process of finding your purpose and feeding that into your creative resilience. Once you bring everything together, you’ll have the tools to become more resilient in creative industries.This course is designed for anyone in a creative industry looking to build resilience and find their personal purpose.You may be interested if you’re a junior creative needing to build a positive creative mindset, or if you’re a manager looking for techniques to better understand your team.