D&AD is an education charity that promotes and enables excellence in design and advertising. Each year, D&AD Awards gather the world’s best creative work from across the commercial design, advertising, production, and craft disciplines to be judged by more than 330 global creative leaders, practitioners and innovators.
“It was great to receive the D&AD Pencil alongside some of the biggest and best international names in the industry. It’s a fantastic accolade and achievement. So far, we have helped over 3500 children by making them laugh as they learn and alleviate procedural anxiety.”
Jake, a Senior Fellow and Art Design & Media Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Associate Professor in Illustration Animation at Kingston School of Art, first rolled out the interactive books at Great Ormond Street Hospital. The idea was inspired by Jake’s Get Better Books colleague Georgina, a former tutee at Kingston School of Art, following her experience both as a child and an adult, in receiving hospital treatment information.
Together they developed the books to help sick children understand their treatment, by creating beautiful designs which help to make really poorly children feel better.
“Hospital produced information can be really scary stuff for children and difficult to understand”.
Get Better Books are now being distributed to hospitals across the UK, including Cardiff, Liverpool, Glasgow, Nottingham and Birmingham and have even gone international, with translations into German and Arabic.
The international judging panel were unanimous in their decision that Jake and Georgina’s initiative was innovative and creative “we were commended on how our endeavours were making a real impact across such a wide realm”.
Jake and Georgina are planning more creative interventions for children suffering a wide range of conditions, including blood cancer, and are actively looking for funding to support their endeavours.
For more information visit their website www.getbetterbooks.co.uk
Hear from Jake himself about Get Better Books in his video for D&AD.
