Mark Ashley-Wilson’s D&AD Diary: Day 3

Australia’s jury representative on the D&AD Cyber Jury is MarkAshley-Wilson, digital director at Three Drunk Monkeys, Sydney, whoreports daily from London, exclusively for the CB Asia Blog. For moreD&AD insight Follow him on Twitter.

Day 3

Bythe time we got started today it seemed like we had been here for aweek. As a group of jurors we have become a close bunch of mates. Wehave spent over thirty hours over the past three days in a small darkroom together talking about what all of us are seriously passionateabout – websites. The ‘group’ are a collection of CD’s, ECD’s,Strategists from the best interactive agencies across the globe – theyare all amazing people.

Our Jury Foreman, Maurizzio Mazzariol, Interactive CD at Wieden+KennedyPortland is a great bloke and he made the process open and free fordiscussion. His only mandate was that we really push only for the siteswith big ideas at the core, which are also superbly executed. Soundseasy, but not really when you have hundreds of great sites to judge.It’s way too easy to see a site that has been produced amazingly with amassive budget and head for the YES button. Most of those sites weretechnically pixel perfect – used the medium well, had awesomedevelopers but they all lacked a good idea. Some of the budgets used toproduce massive animated sites was beyond a joke as there was simply noidea to them at all. The overuse of Papervision to build a site wasamazing. They relied on the cool use of technology to get them over theline. This has been happening for way too long and has to stop if sitesare to start competing with the mediums still getting larger budgets.We quickly dismissed sites that used technology as the creative ideaand simply focused on sites that simply had a big idea using whatevertechnology to make it an awesome site.

We had heaps of debateover the graphic design category as only two sites made it to the finaland they were both questionable. We finally decided that one was inwith a chance.

Another great debate was held over the use ofphotography in a site. As we had several photographers sites it quicklybecame clear that we could not judge on the quality of the images butHOW the photography actually made the experience of the site a betterjourney. Pretty pictures alone on a website was just not good enough -the images had to be a ‘part of the site experience’ in every way. Onlyone site stood tall and it was amazing, but was let down by a poorinterface and nav structure.

At the end of the day we had around11 nominations and we went through all of them (for the tenth time)dissecting them against our criteria. Two, maybe three sites stood tall.

While our iPod Touch’s were down Rachel and I browsed some awesome sites like sfw-porn.com and Rewritten Spidermanwe laughed at it but also decided that user created ‘basic’ stuff isjust plain funny and we should be encouraging more of it. When itbecomes too well done and too perfect it sometimes loses it’s basicappeal. Keep it simple.

We headed to the pub all mind-fucked andtired but had found a common ground between all of us – our passion forgreat ideas, executed fantastically using the right technology.

Out of an original 700+ sites we made it to two, maybe three that deserve a pencil. Done.