Advertising design graduate wins London award
AN Otago advertising graduate says rebellious student culture was behind her edgy, awardwinning redesign of classic cartoon character Beryl the Peril — the female equivalent of Dennis the Menace.
Aicha Wijland graduated last year with a graduate diploma in advertising from the University of Otago, and a bachelor in fine art from the Dunedin School of Art.
She has won a prestigious Yellow Pencil award in the 2018 Design and Art Direction Awards (D&AD), in the New Blood category for emerging writers and designers.
Thousands of people from around the world enter the Londonbased awards every year. Ms Wijland is the first New Zealander to win a top prize.
Ms Wijland took on a brief from Beano to redesign an animated version of Beryl, a character who first appeared in 1953.
The cartoon was created by David Law, the creator of ‘‘Dennis the Menace’’.
‘‘Beryl spoke to me as she’s a very strongwilled, fearless character, a great role model for young girls,’’ Ms Wijland said.
She enjoyed studying at Otago and felt it had inspired her design.
‘‘It’s likely that some of my underlying inspiration for Beryl’s rebelliousness came out of the student culture at Otago, especially around the music scene.’’
She went through Brandbach, the university’s advertising specialisation programme, run by her father, Otago Business School senior lecturer Dr Roel Wijland, and next month was starting a job as art director at Melbourne advertising agency CHE Proximity.