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Juror Spotlight
Daryn HenryCreative Lead,Relevate Health
Daryn’s lifelong passion has been the concise visual conveyance of essential information. He graduated with a degree in Graphic Information Design from the renowned Falmouth University in the UK. His design philosophy is grounded in the program’s mantra, “transforming information into communication for a specific target audience.”
With close to three decades as a marketing creative, Daryn has leveraged this philosophy to create award-winning healthcare marketing campaigns at large agencies, including Sudler and Hennessey, Harrison and Star, and now Relevate Health. By partnering with strategy and analytics teams who uncover the questions that audiences are asking, it is Daryn’s design guidance that delivers answers via rich, optimized experiences that delight and inspire action. An audience-first, creativity-with-purpose approach has driven all he has touched.
As the creative lead at Relevate Health, his role is to mentor and manage the agency’s creative team, comprising of UX, copy and art/design. Together they are accountable for high quality written, spoken and visual market communications and storytelling for their clients’ brands.
He resides in New Jersey, with his young family including 2 rescue lab mixes.
What was your first job?
Two early jobs come to mind. Working as an apprentice at a metal fabrication shop, and as an intern for a screen-printing factory building slot machines. Both were dirty, monotonous, grueling jobs, either grinding down steel fire escapes or cleaning dozens of ink-loaded print screens, and both had you scrubbing for over an hour in the shower at the end of a hard day. But they both taught me a valuable lesson as a designer regarding measure twice, cut once. Any error I made in the design studio meant hours of discomfort for those on the shop floor. It was better to meticulously plan for the right outcome than cause expensive rework.
What’s one thing you wish you knew when you first started your career?
Helvetica was as awesome and versatile as my college professor had always told me it was.
What fuels your creativity?
Smart risk-taking, deep insights into audience needs & motivation, relevant data, judgment-free ideation, an objective north star, looking in places you would never think would have answers, time to think and an uninhibited sense that being creative can be fulfilling, fun AND purposeful. Lots of Lego, and a good G&T doesn’t hurt.
What’s one of the greatest innovations you have seen in your industry?
The advent of AI as a tool, especially generative AI and its impact on the creative industries is comparable with the arrival of the first Macs. It’s revolutionary. It is enhancing the way we ideate, and the speed at which we can move from idea to sketch or draft, and then from iteration to execution. It has created a complex world of morality and legal and regulatory implications, and a threat to our validation as creatives, but I see it as a powerful collaborative tech that we should embrace or be left behind. It does not change the process of inspiration or origination, it simply allows creatives to fine tune the creative process, by continuing to control the inputs and manage the outputs. Craft will no longer be the barrier, only the limits of our imagination.
When you look at your phone in the morning, what do you open first?
My email, including CNN’s 5 Things, to get the synapses firing, followed by the Whatsapp group with mates back home in Wales who have been throwing banter, and talking rugby while I’ve been asleep, then Instagram for my cultural and visual fix, and lastly what my day on my work calendar looks like. All while my head is still on the pillow.
What is your evaluation process for w3 Awards projects this year?
The things I am looking for this year are entries that do not follow the conventional, block and tackle route. Solutions that wrap the audience up in the essence of the brand, motivate them to action…be part of a movement…an experience. Work that pushes the boundaries of innovation and tech, be it a new impactful app or a game-changing use of AI, or something new altogether. And I always need to see work that is brutally elegant in its simplicity, sticky in its memorability, directive in its mission, and has the kind of stopping power one cannot ignore.
To have your work honored by esteemed w3 Awards jurors like Daryn, enter your work by our Final Entry Deadline on June 23rd, 2023.