RT Creative Lab wins D&AD’s PENCIL award with ‘The Endless Letter’ Instagram series honoring WWII victims

RT Creative Lab’s ‘The Endless Letter’ Instagram series has nabbed a Wood Pencil at the 2021 Design and Art Direction (D&AD) Awards ceremony, the ultimate creative accolade, aspired-to by the best from around the world.

‘The Endless Letter’ Instagram series won the coveted Pencil award in the Writing for Design category. The Wood Pencil award represents the best in advertising and design from the year. RT was among such winners in the category as Spotify, BBDO, Droga5 NY, Ogilvy and others.

Headquartered in London, D&AD has been inspiring a community of creative thinkers by nurturing and stimulating the finest in design and advertising since 1962. RT Creative Lab’s 2021 Pencil is the 25th given to a Russian entrant by D&AD’s jury since the inception of its award.

The number of entries for the notoriously tough-to-win competition varies each year. All 430 Pencil-winning and shortlisted entries from the 2021 awards ceremony are showcased on the D&AD website – an online archive for creatives all around the world.

 ‘The Endless Letter’ is a unique graphic series featuring hundreds of excerpts from original World War II letters from the frontline, which have been collected from Russian archives by the team from the ‘Letters from the Front’ project. The quotes are accompanied with illustrations created by young students of the Moscow RANEPA Design School, as well as renowned artists Peter Bankov and Mikhail Sorkin. The letter fragments and illustrations were shared line-by-line on Instagram Stories, creating a kind of ‘endless letter’ with an original, non-stop score by young Russian composer Max Makarychev.

“Behind every line, every extract was a real person. That’s what makes The Endless Letter especially poignant. We have quoted around 400 letters, each giving a comprehensive story in just one frame,” says RT Creative Lab producer Elena Medvedeva, who edited and curated ‘The Endless Letter’ series. 

‘The Endless Letter’ is part of the #VictoryPages project – a large, multi-platform digital project dedicated to 75 years since victory over Nazism. It presents an opportunity to assess the magnitude of May 9, 1945, the day the war ended for the USSR, through the personal impressions of contemporaries. Nearly 27 million were killed or died during the war. Victory Day is significant in Russia because every family has a war hero who either returned home or died in battle. The #VictoryPages project is a story of victory told for the young, by the young, using the language of modern media, on five social networks.

Different series of the #VictoryPages project have gathered a total of 80 awards, including Webbys, Clio Awards, Epica Awards, Shorty Social Good Awards and Red Dot Awards, among others.

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