Connect the dots: Baillat Studio’s conceptual identity champions the Canadian design community

The ADCC Awards have been a prestigious platform for recognising creative excellence in Canada since 1949, with winning entries becoming part of Canadian creative history, documented in print, and now available online in the archive. For the 2022 iteration of the awards, The Advertising & Design Club of Canada (ADCC) enlisted the expertise of Baillat Studio, a Montreal-based multi-platform design and production studio, to create a captivating identity for their call for entries. The resulting concept revolves around the idea of ‘Connecting the Dots,’ visually represented by a galaxy of interlinked dots – symbolising the Canadian creative community – with the ADCC serving as a meeting point. “During the ideation process,” Art Director Gabriel Cance reveals, “we agreed early on that we wanted to do a typographic campaign. We felt that previous ADCC campaigns had focused more on an angle of advertisement.” Taking off from that thought, the visual system for this ADCC campaign took a text-forward approach, aiming for elegance and minimalism, while maintaining visual impact. To bring the central idea to life, collaborating with author and poet Steve Savage was an obvious choice, as the Baillat Studio team are not only admirers of Savage’s work, but have collaborated with him on multiple occasions. “Savage's practice focuses on generating text via search engines,” shares Project Manager Samuel Gauvreau Des Aulniers. “When the concept for ‘Connecting the Dots’ was developed – to reflect the idea that ADCC is a meeting point for the Canadian creative community – even more so in the aftermath of a painful pandemic, the phrase quickly became central to the project. The result is also, happily, playful.” Keeping with Savage’s style and process, the French and English text for the brand materials was generated by conducting a simple search query of ‘Connecting the Dots…’