Curtin University’s Maya Halilovic and Marina Vasilieva win D&AD New Blood pencils
Curtin University’s Maya Halilovic and Marina Vasilievaare amongst the 211 entries worldwide that have picked up pencils at the prestigious 2016 D&AD New Blood awards.
It’s thefirst time a student from Curtin or Western Australia has ever won a New Bloodpencil, let alone two in the same year.
Vasilieva entered for The Telegraph Brief. Her ‘GeoTelegraph‘ idea aimed to use discussion and collaboration to empower a young audience to engage with the news and involve themselves in what they felt were relevant and contemporary issues, using geotagging and accessible smartphoneservices.
Halilovic entered for the Dr Martens Brief. Her ‘Band In A Booth‘ entry aimedto disrupt today’s music industry by giving local bands a chance to play liveduring peak-hour air time on radio stations, helping artists that might otherwisestruggle to be noticed on commercial radio.
Both will be heading to London in July to find out which pencils they’ve won, receive their awards and try for a place at the prestigious D&AD New Blood Academy – an exclusive boot camp for New Blood Pencil winners. Partnering with WPP, New Blood Academy is dedicated to finding new talent; nurturing, equipping and guiding young creatives into their future careers.

5 Comments
Congratulations Maya and Marina, great work. You might not get dozens of encouraging comments here but there are plenty of us out there who are silently applauding you. A D&AD Pencil is something to be proud of. Well done.
That’s brilliant news girls-what a way to kick start your respective careers.
I like the idea of GeoTelegraph, but why is it only aimed at younger audiences? Wouldn’t the awesomeness of the idea be made even more awesome if more people were using it? Like Facebook, for example, if it was kept only for Uni kids, do you think it would have exploded to what it is today?
Great job guys! These are both really strong, simple ideas that I’d be stoked to have made.
Hey guys, thanks so much for your feedback and kind words!
Maxwell – I totally agree with what you’re saying and I do agree that maintaining a broad audience would have made it more effective, but for the purpose of this brief I have just restricted it to the demographic they were specifically asking us to address, which was a young audience.