Award-winning designer Juan Carlos Pagan, co-founder and partner at creative studio Sunday Afternoon, has developed the first brand identity for the Young Ones Student Awards, a showcase for advertising, digital communication and design students. Pagan notes that Young Ones branding presented a challenge, as the program encompasses four separate competitions. Three of the competitions — Young Ones ADC, Young Ones One Show Brief competition, and Young Ones TDC — have origins in other awards from The Onc Club for Creativity, each with their own well-known icons.
Pagan chose to leverage these existing icons — the historic Art Directors Club ADC Cube, The One Show Pencil, and Type Directors Club circular seal — to develop a simple and dynamic new icon that incorporates all three shapes around the central “Y” representing Young Ones. The identity extends to each of the individual competitions, where the flat, singular design allows them to stand on their own by highlighting the original cube, pencil or circle shape in yellow within the context of the overall Young Ones branding icon.
“The branding was very much an exercise in geometry and reduction,” said Pagan, a past winner of multiple Cubes, Pencils, and TDC certificates, and a current TDC Advisory Board member. The branding also works in conjunction with the Young Ones 2025 call for entries campaign, designed by Lebassis.