Congratulations to Atrin Yazdani-Biuki (IDEA Grad 2022) for winning 2020 ADCC Student Competition Silver Award in Graphic Design with 'Mountain Dew Flavours'.

Atrin received two additional awards for this project in addition to the ADCC award: RGD Student Awards 2020 — Zulu Alpha Kilo Award for Advertising Design Honourable Mention and RGD Student Awards 2020 — Haft2 Award of Colour Honourable Mention.

About the project

Courses: IDES 341 Visual Communication Workshops II and IDES 381 Visual Communication Studio II: Illustration Concentration

Instructors: Patrick Cotter and Benjamin Frey

Client: Mountain Dew

I combined two courses together for this project. One was Ben's Vector Illustration course, choosing a company and focusing entirely on making four different illustrations completely on Illustrator. The other was Patrick's Copywriting workshop that also required us to choose a company and make at least three headlines or body copy for them.

I was working on Patrick's copywriting assignment and trying to come up with a company that I wanted to do my project on and at the same time I was trying to find a company to do my illustrations for Ben's course. That's when I got the idea that maybe I could possibly make this into a fun ad campaign project that I will be able to use in my portfolio, combining both the copywriting and illustrations from the two courses. After asking both instructors for their approval to mix the two courses together, they supported me and helped me fulfill my ideas for this project.

Project Brief

Rationale: Keeping in line with Mountain Dew’s high sugar and caffeine content, various new flavors are introduced while maintaining the brand’s exhilarating and often bizarre personality.

Overview: Mountain Dew is a carbonated soft drink with no alcohol and has the following key ingredient- carbonated water, fructose, orange juice, added flavours, caffeine and yellow 5. It comes in various flavours, variants and colours. It is an exhilarating drink. It has higher amount of caffeine as compared to other soft drinks of this category. It has high sugar amount as compared to its competitors. They are strongly associated with adventure and adrenaline pumping sports. Its brand ambassadors are people from various daring sports such as racing car drivers, skaters, mountain bikers.

What they want and what they do to achieve it: To create product awareness and increase customer base for this product. They use Facebook and Twitter to connect to its target customer base. For ads, they have created various strange and crazy television ads to appeal to younger audiences (i.e. puppy-monkey-baby ad).

Key Objectives: They hope they can generate more customers and sales into their stores while improving the way they stand out against the crowd. They need to compete against big brand named beverages like Pepsi, Coca Cola, and Sprite (with many others). They are hoping to create interest with the new series of illustrations.

Target Market: Youth, teens, and millennials 16 to 25. This segment is young and have liking of daring and challenging sports. High sugar and caffeine make it an ideal sport drink for adventure loving people.

Values: They want to maximize the authenticity of its brand while helping out the adventurous and creative community while helping to drive youth and people participating in adventurous and action sports. They do this by financing and sponsoring events and prize money throughout communities.

About the ADCC Student Awards

The ADCC awards the best student work in Canada and looks for the best portfolio pieces from students of Advertising, Graphic Design, Editorial & Book Design, and Interactive programs.

The ADCC Student Competition is a great way for students to have their work noticed by the professional community.

Winning work will be featured on the ADCC Archive, alongside work belonging to the industry’s top professionals – cementing your place in Canadian creative history, which stretches back over 70 years.

Full details about the competition are available at: http://studentawards.theadcc.ca.

Check out more award winning images by Capilano University IDEA School of Design in Vancouver at archive.theadcc.ca.

About The RGD

Through the Association of Registered Graphic Designers (the RGD), Canadian designers exchange ideas, educate and inspire, set professional standards and build a strong, supportive community dedicated to advocating for the value of design.

Representing over 4,100 design professionals, including firm owners, freelancers, managers, educators and students, the RGD was created in 1996 by an Act of the Ontario Legislature (Bill Pr 56) and is the only graphic design association in North America to have this type of legislation.

The Certified RGD designation is a signal of quality and competence to the profession, public and government. Successful candidates have met a rigorous set of standards that includes documented levels of relevant, professional education and experience as well as competence in the areas of business, design principles, research, accessible design and ethics demonstrated through the successful completion of the RGD’s certification process.

Our vision is for a graphic design profession that is broadly valued for its contribution to life, commerce and society.

For all the 2020 RGD Awards of Excellence winners, see rgd.ca.

For more on Atrin follow her on Insta @artkrawler.