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What worked in The Witcher 3 and what didn't: looking back on a landmark RPG with CD Projekt Red "We learned a lot of lessons down the road." Image credit: CD Projekt Red Feature by Robert Purchese Associate Editor Published on May 31, 2025 Do you remember what you were doing when The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was released? It came out on 19th May 2015. I remember because I was inside CD Projekt Red at the time, trying to capture the moment for you - a moment I'm unlikely to replicate there or anywhere else. I recall sitting in the studio's canteen in the small hours of the morning, after a midnight launch event in a mall in Warsaw, chewing on a piece of cold pizza and wondering out loud what would come next for the studio, because at the time, who could know? One era was ending and another was about to begin. Would it bring the fame and fortune CD Projekt Red desired? Today, more than 60 million sales of The Witcher 3 later, we know the answer is yes. The Witcher 3 became a role-playing classic. It delivered one of the most touchable medieval worlds we've explored, a rough place of craggy rocks and craggier faces, of wonky morales and grim realities, of mud and dirtiness. And monsters, though not all were monstrous to look at. It was a world of grey, of superstition and folklore, and in it stood we, a legendary monster hunter, facing seemingly impossible odds. The Witcher 3 took fantasy seriously. But the decade since the game's release has been turbulent for CD Projekt Red. The studio launched its big new sci-fi series in 2020 with Cyberpunk 2077, and though the game has now sold more than 30 million copies, making it monetarily a success, it had a nightmarish launch. The PS4 version had to be removed from sale. It brought enormous pressure, growing pains and intense scrutiny to the studio, and CD Projekt Red would spend a further three years patching and updating - and eventually releasing an expansion - before public opinion would mostly turn around. Today the studio returns to safer ground, back to The Witcher world with the new game The Witcher 4, and as we look forward to it we should also look back, to the game that catapulted the studio to fame, and see what has been learnt. The Witcher 3 is at version 4.04 today, a number that represents an enormously long period of post-release support.Watch on YouTube It all began with naivety, as perhaps any ambitious project should. It's easy to forget that 14 years ago, when The Witcher 3 was being conceived, CD Projekt Red had never made an open-world game before. The Witcher 1 and The Witcher 2 were linear in their approaches. It's also easy to forget that the people making the game were 14 years younger and less experienced. Back then, this was the studio's chance at recognition, so it aimed high in order to be seen. "The Witcher 3 was supposed to be this game that will end all other games," Marcin Blacha, the lead writer of the game, tells me. Simply make an open-world game that's also a story-driven game and release it on all platforms at the same time. How hard could it be? "When I'm thinking about our state of mind back in those days, the only word that comes to my mind is enthusiastic," Blacha says. "It was fantastic because we were so enthusiastic that we were full of courage. We were trying to experiment with stuff and we were not afraid. We were convinced that when we work with passion and love, it will pay off eventually." Every project has to begin somewhere and for Blacha, the person tasked with imagining the story, The Witcher 3 could only begin with Ciri, the daughter-of-sorts to The Witcher's central monster hunter character Geralt. As Blacha says, "The most important thing about Geralt and the most important thing about the books is the relationship between Geralt, Ciri and Yennefer. I already did two games with no sign of Ciri, no sign of Yennefer, and then we finally had a budget and proper time for pre-production, so for me, it was time to introduce both characters." It's a decision that would have major repercussions for the rest of The Witcher series at CD Projekt Red. Blacha didn't know it then, but Ciri would go on to become the protagonist of The Witcher 4. Had she not been the co-protagonist of The Witcher 3 - for you play as her in several sections during the game - who knows if things would have worked out the same way. It's an understandable progression as it is, though there is still some uncertainty among the audience about Ciri's starring role. But Ciri's inclusion came with complications, because the Ciri we see in the game is not the Ciri described in the books. That Ciri is much closer to the Ciri in the Netflix Witcher TV show, younger and more rebellious in a typical teenager way. She might be an important part of the fiction, then, but that doesn't mean she was especially well liked. "People were thinking that she's annoying," says Blacha, who grew up reading The Witcher books. CD Projekt Red, then, decided to make a Ciri of its own, aging her and making her more "flesh and bone", as Blacha puts it. He fondly recalls a moment in the game's development when reviewing the Ciri sections of the game, and saying aloud to studio director Adam Badowski how much he liked her. "I didn't know that she's going to be the protagonist of the next game," he says, "but I said to Adam Badowski, she's going to be very popular." Once Ciri had been earmarked for inclusion in The Witcher 3, the idea to have her pursued by the phantom-like force of the Wild Hunt - the members of which literally ride horses in the night sky, like Santa Claus' cursed reindeer - came shortly after. CD Projekt Red had introduced the Wild Hunt in The Witcher 2 so it made sense. The outline of the main story was then laid down as a one-page narrative treatment. Then it was expanded to a two-page treatment, a four page treatment, an eight page treatment and so on. At around 10 pages, it already had the White Orchard prologue, almost the entirety of the No Man's Land zone, and a hint of what would happen on Skellige and in Novigrad. When it was around 40 pages long, the quest design team was invited in. CD Projekt Red made their Ciri older than she is in the books. | Image credit: CD Projekt Red The quest design team's job is to turn a story into a game, and this was a newly created department for The Witcher 3, created because the old way of writers designing the quests wasn't working any more. "We were struggling a bit with making sure that every written story that we have prepared is also a story that we can play well," Paweł Sasko says. He joined CD Projekt Red to be a part of that quest design team. The quest design team carves up a narrative treatment, paragraph by paragraph, and expands those into playable questlines for the game. "It's basically something between game design and a movie scenario," Sasko says. There's no dialogue, just a description of what will happen, and even a one-paragraph prompt can balloon into a 20-30 page design. Among the paragraphs Sasko was given to adapt was a storyline in No Man's Land concerning a character known as the Bloody Baron. The Bloody Baron storyline is widely acclaimed and has become synonymous with everything Sasko and CD Projekt Red were trying to do with the game. It's a storyline that probes into mature themes like domestic abuse, fatherhood, and love and loss and grief. More importantly, it presents us with a flawed character and allows us time and space to perhaps change our opinion of them. It gives us layers many other games don't go anywhere near. When Sasko first encountered the storyline, there was only an outline. "It said that Geralt meets the Bloody Baron who asks Geralt to hunt a monster and look for his wife and daughter, and for that, he is going to share information about Ciri and tell Geralt where she went. That was pretty much it." And Sasko already knew a few things about what he wanted to do. He knew he wanted to show No Man's Land as a Slavic region bathed in superstitions and complex religious beliefs, one that had been ravaged by famine and war. He also knew the tone of the area was horror because this had been outlined by Blacha and the leaders of The Witcher 3 team. Says Blacha: "My opinion is that a successful Witcher game is a mix of everything, so you have a horror line, you have a romance, you have adventure, you have exploration. When we started to think about our hubs, we thought about them in terms of a show, so No Man's Land, the hub with the Bloody Baron, was horror; Skellige was supposed to be an adventure; and Novigrad was supposed to be a big city investigation." But there were key missing pieces then from the Bloody Baron sequence we know today. The botchling, for instance - the monstrous baby the quest revolves around. It didn't exist. It was an idea that came from Sasko after he read a Slavic bestiary. "Yes," he says, "the botchling idea came from me." The Bloody Baron. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red He wanted the botchling to be the conduit through which more mature themes of the story could be approached - something overt to keep you busy while deeper themes sunk in. It's an approach Sasko says he pinched from Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski, after deconstructing his work. "What he's doing is he's trying to find universal truths about human beings and struggles, but he doesn't tell those stories directly," Sasko says. "So for instance racism: he doesn't talk about that directly but he finds an interesting way how, in his world, he can package that and talk about it. I followed his method and mimicked it." This way the botchling becomes your focus in the quest, as the Baron carries it back to the manor house and you defend him from wraiths, but while you're doing that, you're also talking and learning more about who the Bloody Baron - who Phillip Strenger - is. "I wanted you to feel almost like you're in the shoes of that Bloody Baron," Sasko says. "Peregrination is this path in Christianity you go through when you want to remove your sins, and that's what this is meant to be. He's just trying to do it, and he's going through all of those things to do something good. And I wanted the player to start feeling like, 'Wow, maybe this dude is not so bad.'" It's a quest that leaves a big impression. An email was forwarded to Sasko after the game's release, written by a player who had lost their wife and child as the Baron once had. "And for him," he says, "that moment when Baron was carrying the child was almost like a catharsis, when he was trying so badly to walk that path. And the moment he managed to: he wrote in his letter that he broke down in tears." There's one other very significant moment in The Witcher 3 that Sasko had a large hand in, and it's the Battle of Kaer Morhern, where the 'goodies' - the witchers and the sorceresses, and Ciri - make a stand against the titular menace of the Wild Hunt. Sasko designed this section specifically to emotionally tenderise you, through a series of fast-paced and fraught battles, so that by the time the climactic moment came, you were aptly primed to receive it. The moment being Vesemir's death - the leader of the wolf school of witchers and father figure to Geralt. This, too, was Sasko's idea. "We needed to transition Ciri from being a hunted animal to becoming a hunter," he tells me, and the only event big enough and with enough inherent propulsion was Vesemir's death. Eredin, the leader of the Wild Hunt, breaks Vesemir's neck. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red But for all of the successful moments in the game there are those that didn't work. To the team that made the game, and to the players, there are things that clearly stand out. Such as Geralt's witcher senses, which allow him to see scent trails and footsteps and clues in the world around him. Geralt's detective mode, in other words. Sasko laughs as he cringes about it now. "We've overdone the witcher senses so much, oh my god," he says. "At the time when we were starting this, we were like, 'We don't have it in the game; we have to use it to make you feel like a witcher.' But then at the end, especially in the expansions, we tried to decrease it so it doesn't feel so overloaded." He'd even turn it down by a further 10 to 20 per cent, he says. There were all of the question marks dotted across the map, luring us to places to find meagre hidden treasure rewards. "I think we all scratch our heads about what we were thinking when trying to build this," Sasko tells me. "I guess it just came from fear - from fear that the player will feel that the world is empty." This was the first time CD Projekt Red had really the player's hand go, remember, and not controlled where in the world you would be. Shallow gameplay is a criticism many people have, especially in the game's repetitive combat, and again, this is something Sasko and the team are well aware of. "We don't feel that the gameplay in Witcher 3 was deep enough," he says. "It was for the times okay, but nowadays when you play it, even though the story still holds really well, you can see that the gameplay is a bit rusty." Also, the cutscenes could have been paced better and had less exposition in them, and the game in general could have dumped fewer concepts on you at once. Cognitive overload, Sasko calls it. "In every second sentence you have a new concept introduced, a new country mentioned, a new politician..." It was too much. More broadly, he would also have liked the open-world to be more closely connected to the game's story, rather than be, mostly, a pretty backdrop. "It's like in the theatre when you have beautiful decorations at the back made of cardboard and paper, and not much happens to them except an actor pulls a rope and it starts to rain or something." he says. It's to do with how the main story influences the world and vice versa, and he thinks the studio can be better at it. Ciri and Geralt look at a coin purse in The Witcher 3. This is, coincidentally, the same tavern you begin the game in, with Vesemir, and the same tavern you meet Master Mirror in. | Image credit: Eurogamer / CD Projekt Red One conversation that surprises me, when looking back on The Witcher 3, is a conversation about popularity, because it's easy to forget now - with the intense scrutiny the studio seems always to be under - that when development began, not many people knew about CD Projekt Red. The combined sales of both Witcher games in 2013 were only 5 million. Poland knew about it - the Witcher fiction originated there and CD Projekt Red is Polish - and Germany knew about it, and some of the rest of Europe knew about it. But in North America, it was relatively unknown. That's a large part of the reason why the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2 was made at all, to begin knocking on that door. And The Witcher 3, CD Projekt Red hoped, would kick that door open. "We knew that we wanted to play in the major league," says Michał Platkow-Gilewski, vice president of communications and PR, stealing a quote from Cyberpunk character Jackie. That's why The Witcher 3 was revealed via a Game Informer cover story in early 2013, because that was deemed the way to do things there - the way to win US hearts, Platkow-Gilewski tells me. And it didn't take long for interest to swell. When Platkow-Gilewski joined CD Projekt Red to help launch the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2 in 2012, he was handing out flyers at Gamescom with company co-founder Michał Kicinski, just to fill presentations for the game. By the time The Witcher 3 was being shown at Gamescom, a few years later, queues were three to four hours long. People would wait all day to play. "We had to learn how to deal with popularity during the campaign," Platkow-Gilewski says. Those game shows were crucial for spreading the word about The Witcher 3 and seeing first-hand the impact the game was having on players and press. "Nothing can beat a good show where you meet with people who are there to see their favourite games just slightly before the rest of the world," he says. "They're investing their time, money, effort, and you feel this support, sometimes love, to the IP you're working on, and it boosts energy the way which you can't compare with anything else. These human to human interactions are unique." He says the studio's leader Adam Badowski would refer to these showings as fuel that would propel development for the next year or so, which is why CD Projekt Red always tried to gather as many developers as possible for them, to feel the energy. It was precisely these in-person events that Platkow-Gilewski says CD Projekt Red lacked in the lead up to Cyberpunk's launch, after Covid shut the world down. The company did what it could by pivoting to online events instead - the world-first playtest of Cyberpunk was done online via stream-play software called Parsec; I was a part of it - and talked to fans through trailers, but it was much harder to gauge feedback this way. "It's easy to just go with the flow and way harder to manage expectations," Platkow-Gilewski says, so expectations spiralled. "For me the biggest lesson learned is to always check reality versus expectations, and with Cyberpunk, it was really hard to control and we didn't know how to do it." It makes me wonder what the studio will do now with The Witcher 4, because the game show sector of the industry still hasn't bounced back, and I doubt - having seen the effect Covid has had on shows from the inside of an events company - whether it ever will. "Gamescom is growing," Platkow-Gilewski says somewhat optimistically. "Gamescom is back on track." But I don't know if it really is. Michał Platkow-Gilewski cites this moment as one of his favourite from the Witcher 3 journey. The crew were at the game show PAX in front of a huge live audience and the dialogue audio wouldn't play. Thankfully, they had Doug Cockle, the English language voice actor of Geralt, with them on the panel, so he live improvised the lines. Watch on YouTube Something else I'm surprised to hear from him is mention of The Witcher 3's rocky launch, because 10 years later - and in comparison to Cyberpunk's - that's not how I remember it. But Platkow-Gilewski remembers it differently. "When we released Witcher 3, the reception was not great," he says. "Reviews were amazing but there was, at least in my memories, no common consensus that this is a huge game which will maybe define some, to some extent, the genre." I do remember the strain on some faces around the studio at launch, though. I also remember a tense conversation about the perceived graphics downgrade in the game, where people unfavourably compared footage of Witcher 3 at launch, with footage from a marketing gameplay trailer released years before it. There were also a number of bugs in the game's code and its performance was unoptimised. "We knew things were far from being perfect," Platkow-Gilewski says. But the studio worked hard in the years after launch to patch and update the game - The Witcher 3 is now on version 4.04, which is extraordinary for a single-player game - and they released showcase expansions for it. Some of Marcin Blacha's favourite work is in those expansions, he tells me, especially the horror storylines of Hearts of Stone, many of which he wrote. That expansion's villain, Master Mirror, is also widely regarded as one of the best in the game, disguised as he is as a plain-looking and unassuming person who happens to have incredible and undefinable power. It's not until deep into the expansion you begin to uncover his devilish identity, and it's this subtle way of presenting a villain, and never over explaining his threat, that makes Master Mirror so memorable. He's gathered such a following that some people have concocted elaborate theories about him. Lead character artist Pawel Mielniczuk tells me about one theory whereby someone discovered you can see Master Mirror's face on many other background characters in the game, which you can, and that they believed it was a deliberate tactic used by CD Projekt Red to underline Master Mirror's devilish power. Remember, there was a neat trick with Master Mirror in that you had already met him at the beginning of The Witcher 3 base game, long before the expansion was ever developed, in a tavern in White Orchard. If CD Projekt Red could foreshadow him as far back as that, the theory went, then it could easily put his face on other characters in the game to achieve a similar 'did you see it?' effect. The real villain in the Hearts of Stone expansion, Gaunter O'Dimm. Better known to many as Master Mirror. There's a reason why he has such a plain-looking face... | Image credit: CD Projekt Red The truth is far more mundane. Other characters in the game do have Master Mirror's face, but only because his face is duplicated across the game in order to fill it out. CD Projekt Red didn't know when it made the original Witcher 3 game that this villager would turn into anyone special. There was a tentative plan but it was very tentative, so this villager got a very villager face. "We just got a request for a tertiary unimportant character," says Mileniczuk. "We had like 30-40 faces for the entire game so we just slapped a random face on him." He laughs. And by the time Hearts of Stone development came around, the face - the identity - had stuck. Expansions were an important part of cementing public opinion around The Witcher 3, then, as they were for cementing public opinion around Cyberpunk. They've become something of a golden bullet for the studio, a way to creatively unleash an already trained team and leave a much more positive memory in our heads. Exactly what went wrong with Cyberpunk and how CD Projekt Red set about correcting it is a whole other story Chris Tapsell told recently on the site, so I don't want to delve into specifics here. Suffice to say it was a hard time for the studio and many hard lessons had to be learned. "The pressure was huge," Platkow-Gilewski says, "because from underdogs we went to a company which will, for sure, deliver the best experience in the world." But while much of the rhetoric around Cyberpunk concerns the launch, there's a lot about the game itself that highlights how much progress the studio made, in terms of making open-world role-playing games. One of my favourite examples is how characters in Cyberpunk walk and talk rather than speak to you while rooted to the spot. It might seem like a small thing but it has a transformative and freeing effect on conversations, allowing the game to walk you places while you talk, and stage dialogue in a variety of cool ways. There's a lot to admire about the density of detail in the world, too, and in the greater variety of body shapes and diversity. Plus let's not forget, this is an actual open world rather than a segmented one as The Witcher 3 was. In many ways, the game was a huge step forward for the studio. Cyberpunk wasn't the only very notable thing to happen to the Witcher studio in those 10 years, either. During that time, The Witcher brand changed. Netflix piggybacked the game's popularity and developed a TV series starring Henry Cavill, and with it propelled The Witcher to the wider world. Curiously, CD Projekt Red wasn't invited to help, which was odd given executive producer Tomek Baginski was well known to CD Projekt Red, having directed the intro cinematics for all three Witcher video games. But beyond minor pieces of crossover content, no meaningful collaboration ever occurred. "We had no part in the shows," Pawel Mileniczuk says. "But it's Hollywood: different words. I know how hard it was for Tomek to get in there, to convince them to do the show, and then how limited influence is when the production house sits on something. It's many people, many decision makers, high stakes, big money. Nobody there was thinking about, Hey, let's talk to those dudes from Poland making games. It's a missed opportunity to me but what can I say?" The debut trailer for The Witcher 4.Watch on YouTube Nevertheless, the Netflix show had a surprisingly positive effect on the studio, with sales of The Witcher 3 spiking in 2019 and 2020 when the first season aired. "It was a really amazing year for us sales wise," Platkow-Gilewski says. This not only means more revenue for the studio but also wider understanding; more people are more familiar with The Witcher world now than ever before, which bodes very well for The Witcher 4. Not that it influenced or affected the studio's plans to return to that world, by the way. "We knew already that we wanted to come back to The Witcher," Platkow-Gilewski says. "Some knew that they wanted to tell a Ciri story while we were still working on Witcher 3." But, again, with popularity also comes pressure. "We'll have hopefully millions of people already hooked in from the get-go but with some expectations and visions and dreams which we have to, or may not be able to, fulfil," Platkow-Gilewski adds. You can already sense this pressure in comments threads about the new game. Many people already have their ideas about what a new Witcher game should be. The Witcher 4 might seem like a return to safer ground, then, but the relationship with the audience has changed in the intervening 10 years. "I think people are again with us," Platkow-Gilewski says. "There are some who are way more careful than they used to be; I don't see the hype train. We also learned how to talk about our game, what to show, when to show. But I think people believe again. Not everyone, and maybe it's slightly harder to talk with the whole internet. It's impossible now. It's way more polarised than it used to be. But I believe that we'll have something special for those who love The Witcher." Here we are a decade later, then, looking forward to another Witcher game by CD Projekt Red. But many things have changed. The studio has grown and shuffled people around and the roles of the people I speak to have changed. Marcin Blacha and Pawel Mielniczuk aren't working on The Witcher 4, but on new IP Project Hadar, in addition to their managerial responsibilities, and Pawel Sasko is full-time on Cyberpunk 2. It's only really Michał Platkow-Gilewski who'll do a similar job for The Witcher 4 as on The Witcher 3, although this time with dozens more people to help. But they will all still consult and they're confident in the abilities of The Witcher 4 team. "They really know what they're doing," says Sasko, "they are a very seasoned team." "We learned a lot of lessons down the road," Platkow-Gilewski says, in closing. "I started this interview saying that we had this bliss of ignorance; now we know more, but hopefully we can still be brave. Before, we were launching a rocket and figuring out how to land on the moon. Now, we know the dangers but we are way more experienced, so we'll find a way to navigate through these uncharted territories. We have a map already so hopefully it won't be such a hard trip."

W Conran Design’s graphic design for last year’s Paris Olympics has won D&AD’s highest accolade. The Black Pencil is reserved for “truly groundbreaking work” and some years none are given out. But this year’s juries awarded three Black Pencils, including the Paris games’ visual identity. The judges called it a “breakthrough for traditional sports marketing aesthetics” and praised the design for being “playful and scalable, with a unifying but distinctive feel that blends heritage and sport.” W Conran Design co-founder and creative director Gilles Deléris called working on the Olympics and Paralympics, “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a designer.” “We are so proud and honoured by this recognition, which celebrates five years of collaboration with the Paris 2024 Organising Committee teams,” he said. “It was a shared commitment to excellence and a design system that is fresh, joyful, and popular.” W Conran Design’s work for the Paris Olympics It is only the fifth time a graphic design project has won a Black Pencil, joining Johnson Banks’ Fruit and Veg stamps for Royal Mail (2004), the new UK coin designs for the Royal Mint (2005), TBWA’s Trillion Dollar Flyers for the exiled Zimbabwean Newspaper (2010), and Hans Thiessen’s provocative annual report for the Calgary Society for Persons with Disabilities (2012). One rebrand has previously won the top honour – Made Thought’s 2015 work for GF Smith. This year, the Paris design was joined on the Black Pencil podium by A$AP Rocky’s music video Tailor Swif, by Iconoclast LA, and FCB New York’s Spreadbeats, which hacked spreadsheets as a way to promote Spotify’s ad offerings. Its Black Pencil was for digital design, and this award caps a fine couple of weeks for that work, which also cleaned up at the ADC Annual awards, where it was named Best in Show. This year, 11,689 entrants from 86 countries submitted 30,000 pieces of work to the D&AD awards. But JKR global executive creative director Lisa Smith, who is also a D&AD trustee, said that judging was tricky due to a level of creative sameness. “Too many entries follow the same established design codes and trends, making everything start to look and feel alike, regardless of category,” she said. “The work that stood out – and was ultimately awarded – was the kind that breaks away from the expected: inspiring, well-crafted, and truly fit for purpose.” The Yellow Pencil is the highest award in each category. There were 48 in total, 11 of which went to the main design categories. These were: Brand Identity Refresh: Porto Rocha’s Nike Run rebrand Porto Rocha’s work for Nike Run New Brand Identity: Meat Studio for Pangmei Deserts Meat Studio’s work for Pangmei Desserts New Brand Identity: Scholz & Friends Berlin for the Tiroler Festspiele Scholz & Friends Berlin’s work for the Tiroler Festspiele New Brand Identity: Angelina Pischikova and Karina Zhukovskaya for mud Angelina Pischikova and Karina Zhukovskaya’s identity for their mud pet care brand. Graphic Design and Packaging Design: Serviceplan Germany’s Price Packs for PENNY Serviceplan Germany’s Price Packs for PENNY Graphic Design and Spatial Design: Circus Grey Peru’s Sightwalks for UNACEM Magazine and Newspaper Design: Uncommon Creative Studio covers for Port Magazine Uncommon Creative Studio’s work for Port Magazine Typography: DutchScot’s work for Danish textile company Tameko DutchScot’s work for Danish textile company Tameko Type Design and Lettering: TypeTogether’s Playwrite for Google TypeTogether’s Playwrite for Google Overall there were 107 pencils awarded in the design categories, led by graphic design (21%), packaging design (17%) and type design and lettering (15%). There were 31 pencils awarded in the branding categories, with double the number of awards in the new brand category (21) compared to brand refresh (10). There were 26 pencils for illustration, 20 for experiential, 12 for typography, and seven for writing for design. Across the board, the winners demonstrate “the power of design not just as a form of art, but as a catalyst for commercial success and behavioural change,” says D&AD CEO, Dara Lynch. “The resurgence of craftsmanship stands as a reminder that in an era of automation, true excellence lies in the thoughtful execution of ideas,” she added. You can see all the D&AD winners here.

It’s been almost one year since Philadelphia’s University of the Arts (UArts) announced its abrupt closure, leaving students, faculty, and alumni bewildered, and outraged. There were a total nine buildings that went up for auction as part of the closure. Scout—a women-owned, Philadelphia-based development and design company—successfully acquired two of them: Dorrance Hamilton Hall, built in 1826 on Broad Street; and Furness Residence Hall, a Victorian masterpiece named after its architect, Frank Furness. Scout announced today public programming that will soon take place at the former UArts buildings it acquired, the first step in its adaptive reuse proposal for the 19th-century buildings. The longterm vision entails maintaining the Hamilton and Furness buildings as hubs for artistic activity in Philadelphia’s Center City. DIGSAU and AOS are helping Scout create a vision plan for the buildings, and ISA Architects is behind a temporary installation that will debut in June. Scout is likewise organizing a “Celebration of Life” to commemorate the Philadelphia mainstay founded in 1876, shuttered in 2024. Scout is partnering with local architects to activate former UArts interior and exterior spaces with public programming. (Mike Persico) “It didn’t feel right to start jumping into the next chapter without acknowledging the past, and allowing space for closure,” Scout founder and managing partner Lindsey Scannapieco told AN. This idea for a Celebration of Life, she noted, will “provide closure, and also cleanse the ground a bit before moving into its next iteration.” Grief and Memory Work At Hamilton Hall, the Celebration of Life for UArts will take place from June 4–8. There, former UArts students, faculty, and alumni will be welcomed back into the campus for performances and programming. Scout has also invited a death doula to guide visitors through “grief and memory work,” Scannapieco said. “Everyone was obviously devastated about the closure. There was a lot of pain and grief. It was very sudden, and very opaque. There were horror stories about enrolled students, professors with tenure. So many people were impacted by it,” Scannapieco added. “The question became, what happens to this real estate in the center of our city? And what does it mean to have this gap in creative, cultural, and student energy downtown?” “No institutions put in bids for the buildings, but people were still very interested in keeping these buildings art-centric,” Scannapieco continued. “We had an incredible outpouring of public support which inspired us to work our butts off to compete in the auction. It was a miracle, to be honest, that we were able to pull it off.” The buildings were left untouched after the bankruptcy auction, notice the flyers still on the walls. (Mike Persico) The Celebration of Life will be followed by more programming in mid-June at the Furness building with Frankie’s Summer Club, a seasonal outdoor hospitality space chock full of wine, ice cream, and more in partnership with local chef Michael Ferreri. ISA Architects is behind the setting inspired by an unbuilt design from Louis Kahn circa 1975 for the nearby Kimmel Center site. Bonafide Community Builders Scout has built a reputation for converting historic Philadelphia buildings into usable, modern spaces like the Bok Building, a former technical high school that now hosts workspaces for makers, businesses, nonprofits, and artists. The Bok has over 250,000 visitors a year and is “home to over 225 small businesses, artists, and makers,” Scannapieco said. “Everything from jewelry designers to architecture studios, interior designers, ceramic workers, glass blowers, a daycare, doggy daycare. A fourth of the building is nonprofits,” she noted, “like Black Star Film Festival, the Garces Foundation, and Girls Inc. There’s also Diadora, an Italian sneaker company, and Bowery Presents, a concert promoter.” Scout’s vision for the Hamilton and Furness buildings is similar to the Bok, although the former UArts structures are much more centrally located, and smaller. Scout will lease out spaces to a comparable group of artists, architects, designers, and nonprofits. Equipment is leftover from UArts, like the ceramics studio pictured above. (Mike Persico) A leftover metal foundry, ceramic workshops, and wood shops are still in situ at the Hamilton and Furness buildings, among other handy ephemera like kilns, so artists can pick up where they left off. There are also 45 dormitory units in the Furness building that Scout hopes to convert into artist housing, and residencies. “Something we’ve heard about over the years from the creative community is the lack of affordable housing access, specifically for artists,” Scannapieco said. “So we’ll be working over time to bring those online as affordable artist housing, and for artist-in-residency programs with nearby institutional partners. Visiting artists can come live and work alongside Philadelphia working artists. Just thinking about the energy exchange that can happen from that is something we’re really excited about.” A more detailed version of the vision plan will be announced in the coming months, Scout said. The first tenants are slated to move in this fall, and the project will be rolled out in phases. Public programming information for the upcoming Celebration of Life is listed on Scout’s website. There will also be opportunities for community driven performances via this sign-up link.

14 May, 2025 In London and Los Angeles, Rob Alderson speaks with Teo Connor about Airbnb's new direction, her career, and the enduring influence of the girl guides. About an hour after CEO Brian Chesky unveiled the new Airbnb app to the world, Teo Connor, the company’s VP of design, takes a moment to reflect on the 18-month project. It’s a key move for Airbnb, which is beefing up its experiences and adding services, so people can book a private chef or a massage through the app. And it was an enormous design challenge for Connor and her team, who had to introduce a dizzying new array of options and information into the UX. “Yeah it was a bit nuts,” she laughs. “But I am really proud that we have been able to make something that feels both familiar and new. It feels magical to pull these three things into an app that people are used to using for one thing.” Teo Connor A big piece of the puzzle was to create the right building blocks that would work for both users and hosts – unglamorous but vital work to create scalable design structures. But for a company that has design woven in its DNA – both Chesky and co-founder Joe Gebbia studied at the Rhode Island School of Design – they also had to create something that looked great too. “We had to be able to condense all this information into three new tabs on the homescreen without it becoming overwhelming,” Connor explains. “How do you do that at scale, and at such density? But also with beauty – we had a lot of conversations about that.” Sitting through Chesky’s presentation on a massive high-definition screen, every pixel of the new app was blown up for everyone to scrutinise. But Connor is clearly satisfied with what she, and everyone else, saw. “We are having to educate people and change their behaviour, so that is a huge challenge,” she says. “But what I love is that when you look at it, it sort of feels inevitable.” We’re changing travel again Rewind a couple of hours and Brian Chesky strides onto the stage to the strains of Ini Kamoze’s Here Comes the Hotstepper. Airbnb has pioneered a way of working that focuses the whole company on a single product calendar, and the summer release is the moment when its new additions are shared with the public. In the past, these changes and updates have been smaller, and sometimes very technical. But this announcement fundamentally changes what Airbnb is, and does. The tagline used in the official release is, “Now you can Airbnb more than an Airbnb.” The audience in Los Angeles includes journalists, influencers, a phalanx of Airbnb staff and a smattering of celebrities (who a nice lady from People magazine identifies for me). Chesky – whom it feels relevant to note is ripped – speaks for about an hour, explaining the company’s origin story, and the travails of the pandemic, when they lost 80% of their business in eight weeks (“Is this the end of Airbnb?” asked Wired in 2020). This context sets up the company’s new direction. “17 years ago we changed the way people travel, and today we are changing travel again,” he explains. https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/All-new-app-demo-2025-Summer-Release-Digital.mp4 While Airbnb was launched as a more interesting alternative to bland hotels, he acknowledges that hotels provide a range of useful things that people need when they are travelling, from haircuts to massages. Airbnb Services is an attempt to replicate those offerings on the app – the icon is a bell like those you find on hotel reception desks. It launched across 260 cities with ten categories – chefs, prepared meals, catering, photography, personal training, massages, spa treatments, hair styling, make-up and nails. Airbnb Experiences, which first launched in 2016, has been “reimagined from the ground up” to offer people local experiences “hosted” by people who know their cities best. It launched across 650 cities with five categories – history and culture, food and drink, nature and outdoors, art and design, and fitness and wellness. They are also rolling out Airbnb Originals – one-off events often with a celebrity host (Megan Thee Stallion, Sabrina Carpenter and American football star Patrick Mahomes are all signed up to host their own experiences). One of the biggest shifts is that Airbnb wants these new categories to be used by people in their own cities as well as visitors, heralding a move from being a travel app to an experience, or community, platform. And all of this needs a whole new design system, which is where Connor and her team of 200 designers come in. A series of design challenges There was an overarching design challenge – to bring these new elements into the Airbnb ecosystem in a way that felt integrated and exciting, but didn’t overshadow the accommodation offering, on which the company has built an $85 billion business. But below that, there were a series of “really fun design challenges” to create the spaces and interfaces that would support this new direction. These included the new homescreen, a new profile page, a new itinerary page (which now had to incorporate timelines broken into hours as well as days) and product description pages, or PDPs, which capture these myriad experiences, from historic tours to wine tasting, and bring them to life in a clear and engaging way. “Brian really wanted the PDPs to tell a story, so you could go from the top to the bottom and really quickly discern what this thing was about,” Connor explains. “For a really long time we were talking about having video. But you have to sit back and watch a video, and it can be quite passive.” The solution was a 2×2 grid which quickly communicates the key information, and then a design structure that allows for scanning. Elsewhere, carousels are used to help users browse the broader range of things they can get via the app. The new Experiences flow in the app The designs needed to strike a fine a balance – to demonstrate breadth and abundance, without sacrificing ease-of-use. “We want people to get the information they need and then get back to doing life,” Connor says. “That’s a big thing for us when we’re designing.” That begins, she explains, with an obsession with simplicity that underpins every design review. “We are constantly asking, do people need this? Do they want it? If no, then take it away.” But the team also thinks a lot about the platform’s personality, “using craft and care to make the experience feel delightful.” Chesky talked in his presentation of bringing more depth and vibrancy back to the app, moving away from the flat, and sometimes soulless, big tech experience. (One commenter praised the new design’s “Web 1.0” sensibility). There are lots of nice touches – when you press the hot air balloon icon for Experiences it belches fire, when you hit the Services bell it shakes as if summoning a concierge. “It’s not about creating pretty things just because we can,” Connor says. “The delightful moments always have a utility behind them.” So on the itinerary page, the check-in time has an icon showing an open door with the lights on behind; the check-out time is accompanied by a closed door with a darkened space behind it. How did this happen? Rewind again, and I sit down with Connor in Airbnb’s London office about six weeks before the new app goes live. You wouldn’t know that they are at the business end of such a huge project; Connor is calm and self-reflective. I first met her back in the early 2010s, when she ran her own graphic design studio in London. She joined Apple in 2016 as a human interface designer, and moved to Airbnb in 2021. Was this – working for some of the biggest design-led companies in technology – always the plan? “Not at all,” she laughs. “It’s surprising and magical to me that this small-time graphic designer from London ended up here. I often ask myself – how did this happen?” The answer, she says, involves luck and timing. But it also speaks to her willingness to say yes to new opportunities, an approach she adopted after once saying no. During an internship at a London ad agency, someone offered Connor the chance to design flyers for a local club night. “I got totally freaked out and ghosted the opportunity,” she says. “I’ve always regretted that, not just saying yes and seeing how it went.” She’d always been interested in creativity, often being taken as a kid to London’s museums where she would happily sketch for hours. “I loved and admired artists,” she says. “But deep inside I knew I wasn’t one. I was a bit of a girl scout, a bit practical. I liked making things, and solving things, and helping people.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Trips-itinerary-demo-2025-Summer-Release-Digital.mp4 Connor says her career has been a mix of “going with the flow and wanting to drive the flow.” She did an art foundation course because someone she worked with doing Saturday shifts in a supermarket was doing one, and she thought it sounded interesting. The course was “a real awakening” and introduced her to graphic design, which she’d go on to study at the University of Middlesex. “I did bumble through life a bit, but I am driven to be good at what I’m doing,” she says. “So even though I might fall into something, once I fall into it, I want to do it the best I can.” She admits to being “bamboozled” when Apple first got in touch. “The email felt like spam,” she laughs, “it was from hello@apple or something.” The new Guest Profile page While she had worked on websites before, she wasn’t a digital product designer. And she was happy in London, running her own studio amid the strong creative community that blossomed in the city at that time. “There were all these small agencies doing really cool work and sharing resources. It was an environment I thrived in, and felt comfortable in. So the idea of leaving all that behind, and going to America where I didn’t know anyone, and I didn’t know how things worked, was very nerve-wracking.” But the memory of the club night flyers spurred her on. “I didn’t want to be the person who says no and regrets it. So I went, and it was the best thing I ever did.” Although she hadn’t had much exposure to digital product design, she found that her experience in wayfinding proved very useful. “With wayfinding you are thinking about how to move people though a space, with visuals and graphics, in a way that tells a story. A lot of that thinking is very similar in digital products.” A defining time Connor spent five years at Apple and moved to Airbnb in 2021, initially as senior director of design, before becoming a VP the following year. She saw in Airbnb what appeared to be a very rare opportunity. “It felt like this was going to be a defining time for the company, and that we would really be able to shape something,” she says. It was also exciting to work for someone who was a designer before he was a founder. “I am fortunate to have a leader who understands the value of design,” Connor says. “For a lot of my peers who work at organisations of this scale, a lot of their job is translation, advocating for design, and trying to get a seat at the table. I never need to advocate for design with Brian – he has made space for the design team to be at the heart of the company.” But once a designer, always a designer. Does he often give feedback on specific design details? “Oh 100%,” Connor laughs. “He has this deep knowledge, and this great perspective, because he is looking at the whole company all of the time. But he’s always in the pixels too, asking about the radius of a button or something.” https://d3faj0w6aqatyx.cloudfront.net/uploads/2025/05/Services-browse-book-demo-2025-Summer-Release-Digital.mp4 Overseeing 200 designers can be challenging, but she sees the fundamentals as being similar to leading much smaller teams. “I don’t think there’s a huge difference between managing five designers or managing 200, when you break it down,” she says. “The ability to build trust, to empower teams, and to be decisive, these all scale up.” She has built a culture which revolves around courage, and says she is drawn to people who, like her, “have a point of view and speak up for what’s right.” “I think that goes back to the Girl Guide thing again,” she says. In a company like Airbnb, where design and business are very intertwined, does she expect her designers to understand the commercial impact of their work? “I expect them to be curious about it, and want to learn,” Connor says. She tries to encourage this commercial awareness through, for example, inviting other teams in the business to share their insights with the design team, and mandating that project reviews include a discussion of the impact created. “We want to make it easy for the team to understand why these things are linked, and why they’re important,” Connor explains. More senior roles are expected to have more of this business acumen, but she doesn’t miss the days when designers often felt like they needed to have an MBA, to speak the right language. “I want our designers to be designers, first and foremost,” she says. Day one Back at the Airbnb launch event, I ask Connor what happens now. “Well, we’re going to have a really good party,” she says. “But I think we are excited to build on all this work now. “I actually think today is like day one,” she says. “I think that’s how it feels for the company.” Design disciplines in this article Industries in this article Brands in this article What to read next The Guardian unveils redesigned app and homepage Digital Design 7 May, 2025 Aad creates guide to more sustainable digital design Digital Design 4 Feb, 2025 How Ragged Edge gamified credit scores for Checkmyfile Digital Design 26 Nov, 2024

"Artificial intelligence, if we're being frank, is a con: a bill of goods you are being sold to line someone's pockets."That is the heart of the argument that linguist Emily Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna make in their new book The AI Con. It's a useful guide for anyone whose life has intersected with technologies sold as artificial intelligence and anyone who's questioned their real usefulness, which is most of us. Bender is a professor at the University of Washington who was named one of Time magazine's most influential people in artificial intelligence, and Hanna is the director of research at the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute and a former member of the ethical AI team at Google.The explosion of ChatGPT in late 2022 kicked off a new hype cycle in AI. Hype, as the authors define it, is the "aggrandizement" of technology that you are convinced you need to buy or invest in "lest you miss out on entertainment or pleasure, monetary reward, return on investment, or market share." But it's not the first time, nor likely the last, that scholars, government leaders and regular people have been intrigued and worried by the idea of machine learning and AI.Bender and Hanna trace the roots of machine learning back to the 1950s, to when mathematician John McCarthy coined the term artificial intelligence. It was in an era when the United States was looking to fund projects that would help the country gain any kind of edge on the Soviets militarily, ideologically and technologically. "It didn't spring whole cloth out of Zeus's head or anything. This has a longer history," Hanna said in an interview with CNET. "It's certainly not the first hype cycle with, quote, unquote, AI."Today's hype cycle is propelled by the billions of dollars of venture capital investment into startups like OpenAI and the tech giants like Meta, Google and Microsoft pouring billions of dollars into AI research and development. The result is clear, with all the newest phones, laptops and software updates drenched in AI-washing. And there are no signs that AI research and development will slow down, thanks in part to a growing motivation to beat China in AI development. Not the first hype cycle indeed.Of course, generative AI in 2025 is much more advanced than the Eliza psychotherapy chatbot that first enraptured scientists in the 1970s. Today's business leaders and workers are inundated with hype, with a heavy dose of FOMO and seemingly complex but often misused jargon. Listening to tech leaders and AI enthusiasts, it might seem like AI will take your job to save your company money. But the authors argue that neither is wholly likely, which is one reason why it's important to recognize and break through the hype.So how do we recognize AI hype? These are a few telltale signs, according to Bender and Hanna, that we share below. The authors outline more questions to ask and strategies for AI hype busting in their book, which is out now in the US.Watch out for language that humanizes AIAnthropomorphizing, or the process of giving an inanimate object human-like characteristics or qualities, is a big part of building AI hype. An example of this kind of language can be found when AI companies say their chatbots can now "see" and "think."These can be useful comparisons when trying to describe the ability of new object-identifying AI programs or deep-reasoning AI models, but they can also be misleading. AI chatbots aren't capable of seeing of thinking because they don't have brains. Even the idea of neural nets, Hanna noted in our interview and in the book, is based on human understanding of neurons from the 1950s, not actually how neurons work, but it can fool us into believing there's a brain behind the machine.That belief is something we're predisposed to because of how we as humans process language. We're conditioned to imagine that there is a mind behind the text we see, even when we know it's generated by AI, Bender said. "We interpret language by developing a model in our minds of who the speaker was," Bender added.In these models, we use our knowledge of the person speaking to create meaning, not just using the meaning of the words they say. "So when we encounter synthetic text extruded from something like ChatGPT, we're going to do the same thing," Bender said. "And it is very hard to remind ourselves that the mind isn't there. It's just a construct that we have produced."The authors argue that part of why AI companies try to convince us their products are human-like is that this sets the foreground for them to convince us that AI can replace humans, whether it's at work or as creators. It's compelling for us to believe that AI could be the silver bullet fix to complicated problems in critical industries like health care and government services.But more often than not, the authors argue, AI isn't bring used to fix anything. AI is sold with the goal of efficiency, but AI services end up replacing qualified workers with black box machines that need copious amounts of babysitting from underpaid contract or gig workers. As Hanna put it in our interview, "AI is not going to take your job, but it will make your job shittier."Be dubious of the phrase 'super intelligence'If a human can't do something, you should be wary of claims that an AI can do it. "Superhuman intelligence, or super intelligence, is a very dangerous turn of phrase, insofar as it thinks that some technology is going to make humans superfluous," Hanna said. In "certain domains, like pattern matching at scale, computers are quite good at that. But if there's an idea that there's going to be a superhuman poem, or a superhuman notion of research or doing science, that is clear hype." Bender added, "And we don't talk about airplanes as superhuman flyers or rulers as superhuman measurers, it seems to be only in this AI space that that comes up."The idea of AI "super intelligence" comes up often when people talk about artificial general intelligence. Many CEOs struggle to define what exactly AGI is, but it's essentially AI's most advanced form, potentially capable of making decisions and handling complex tasks. There's still no evidence we're anywhere near a future enabled by AGI, but it's a popular buzzword.Many of these future-looking statements from AI leaders borrow tropes from science fiction. Both boosters and doomers — how Bender and Hanna describe AI enthusiasts and those worried about the potential for harm — rely on sci-fi scenarios. The boosters imagine an AI-powered futuristic society. The doomers bemoan a future where AI robots take over the world and wipe out humanity.The connecting thread, according to the authors, is an unshakable belief that AI is smarter than humans and inevitable. "One of the things that we see a lot in the discourse is this idea that the future is fixed, and it's just a question of how fast we get there," Bender said. "And then there's this claim that this particular technology is a step on that path, and it's all marketing. It is helpful to be able to see behind it."Part of why AI is so popular is that an autonomous functional AI assistant would mean AI companies are fulfilling their promises of world-changing innovation to their investors. Planning for that future — whether it's a utopia or dystopia — keeps investors looking forward as the companies burn through billions of dollars and admit they'll miss their carbon emission goals. For better or worse, life is not science fiction. Whenever you see someone claiming their AI product is straight out of a movie, it's a good sign to approach with skepticism. Ask what goes in and how outputs are evaluatedOne of the easiest ways to see through AI marketing fluff is to look and see whether the company is disclosing how it operates. Many AI companies won't tell you what content is used to train their models. But they usually disclose what the company does with your data and sometimes brag about how their models stack up against competitors. That's where you should start looking, typically in their privacy policies.One of the top complaints and concerns from creators is how AI models are trained. There are many lawsuits over alleged copyright infringement, and there are a lot of concerns over bias in AI chatbots and their capacity for harm. "If you wanted to create a system that is designed to move things forward rather than reproduce the oppressions of the past, you would have to start by curating your data," Bender said. Instead, AI companies are grabbing "everything that wasn't nailed down on the internet," Hanna said.If you're hearing about an AI product for the first time, one thing in particular to look out for is any kind of statistic that highlights its effectiveness. Like many other researchers, Bender and Hanna have called out that a finding with no citation is a red flag. "Anytime someone is selling you something but not giving you access to how it was evaluated, you are on thin ice," Bender said.It can be frustrating and disappointing when AI companies don't disclose certain information about how their AI products work and how they were developed. But recognizing those holes in their sales pitch can help deflate hype, even though it would be better to have the information. For more, check out our full ChatGPT glossary and how to turn off Apple Intelligence.