Fresh from Berlin’s ceremony, our designers reflect on the experience, their favorite winning projects and the state of the design industry today
Bucharest and Singapore, November 2025 — Brandient receives a Red Dot Design Award for the visual identity of the CoffeEast Festival, 2025 edition, collected at the official Red Dot ceremony in Berlin.
If you somehow missed the relentless celebratory posts we’ve been flooding your feeds with for the past two months: surprise! We won a Red Dot Design Award for the CoffeEast Festival, 2025 edition.
Partner & Design Director Adrian Stănculeț created a visual system for the rising Eastern European coffee culture festival that worked seamlessly across scale and every application, from tiny pins to large-scale venue meshes to festival merch, helping the event grow to nearly twice its previous size. All awards are precious, but as design partners to the CoffeEast Festival from its very beginning (festival name and brand identity created in 2023, with logo design by Ciprian Robu), this one feels extra special.
The Red Dot Design competition, with its predominantly Euro-Asian participants, always brings a refreshing dose of common sense and balance in a design space otherwise heavily influenced by the US. And, perhaps most interestingly to us, every year’s awarded projects reveal industry dynamics and evolutions that might otherwise go unnoticed.
It also just so happens that this year marks exactly 10 years since our first Red Dot Award in 2015, for the BIZ Magazine cover – which made us reflect on how the creative industry has evolved over the past decade. After a quick trip to Berlin for the official Red Dot ceremony to collect our award and celebrate alongside other global winners, our team returned with thoughts. Many thoughts.
Adrian Stănculeț
In my 14 years at Brandient, this Red Dot represents a uniquely meaningful milestone. It resonates deeply, because our work typically involves large-scale projects – that’s our business model – which means we can’t always challenge the management of big organizations with bold, out-of-the-box design approaches. We use design solutions primarily to solve clients’ problems, and only after that, to delight, to seduce, and so on.
That’s why the CoffeEast project felt like a refreshing creative challenge, as I’ve approached it not just as a specialty coffee festival, but as a platform for exceptional design.
As a teaser of what’s to come: I’ve just finalized the visual identity for CoffeEast Festival’s special Christmas edition, that will come to life December 5–7. See you there.
Cristian Kit Paul
What stood out this year was Asia’s fantastic educational strength, especially in China and Taiwan. Many outstanding competition entries came from university design departments, or groups of students tackling their semester-end design assignments with awesome determination, talent and skill. For those of us who have been keeping a close eye on the Asian design scene – this isn’t exactly breaking news. However, for the wider public, the rise of China from a design follower (often just copying what others do) to a design leader could be a truly transformative development. Japanese and Korean designers, once the design industry’s darlings, will have to work really hard to snag these awards now.
A surprise, and dare I say slight disappointment from the perspective of a designer, however, came from the (West) European awardees. Accenture Song, which is the creative division of Arthur Andersen’s ex-accounting company Accenture (revenue: $19B, employees: 800,000+, clients: 9,000+ in 120 countries) won the Agency of the Year award. It’s hard to believe that Accenture Song, which identifies itself as “the world’s largest tech-powered creative group,” didn’t leverage its considerable corporate power and trend-focus positioning (read: everything AI) to secure a string of shiny, but not necessarily superior, ad campaign entries.
Eastern Europe was, as usual, less impressive in numbers, but surprising and memorable in delivery.
All in all, even though the accounting Godzillas of the world can seem to take up all the space, it’s the smaller, medium-sized, and mostly independent companies that are the real stars in the design world. They’re showing off the charm and prestige of the industry by being incredibly creative, technically skilled, and, most of all, brave. This is the real design ecosystem we love to witness and experience.
In our opinion, this is what we should really appreciate, and protect.
Raluca Circo
This year’s Red Dot felt like evaluating the quality of the symphony, not the soloists. We did not see the Best of the Best in design presented as isolated achievements; instead, everything was orchestrated into a well-attuned composition, in which every element reinforces that singular decision, at all times. Excellence in 2025 doesn’t seem to lie in a perfect branding proposal, but in the quality of the whole system that surrounds it.
A great example to support this was the “Rainbow Wool” project by Serviceplan and Hey Studio, which began from a striking and memorable insight: one in twelve sheep are gay. So now imagine building a wool farm for those sheep and let everything grow coherently out of that singular idea. The branding, the material, the woven fabric, the fashion expression and the tone of voice all aligned around one cause. All the instruments picked up the same motif. And that level of integration is what makes a design solution feel inevitable.
To me, Red Dot this year awarded work that knows how to resonate across every layer of its existence.
Andra Rusu
As AI slowly but surely seeps into many aspects of our busy lives, ambitious projects aim to deliver fast solutions and transform tedious processes into dynamic, collaborative, and reliable systems. Some of them won this year: GhostNetZero (Accenture Song), Rainbow Wool (Hey Studio), Un-Classical Music (Landor France), The Revived (Peter Schmidt Group & TeamBBDO), and TinyOcean - Makes a Sea of Difference (Rise, Netherlands).
We’re talking about fantastic initiatives towards sustainability and social engagement through everything design has to offer. Together with grand, collaborative, and fast/ever-evolving ways of solving problems, we’ve seen exquisite, beautifully crafted and singular works, projects reminding us we’re still sensibly human: Triptych on What (Stjepko Rošin, Croatia), Symphony Concerts 2024/2025 (beierarbeit GmbH), Real Typeface (beierarbeit GmbH), Sweet Potato Living – A Gift from the Land (China University of Technology, Taipei City, Taiwan).
About Brandient
Brandient is an independent brand strategy and design consultancy founded in Bucharest in 2002 by Aneta Bogdan, Cristian Kit Paul and Mihai Bogdan — never part of a global network, working directly for the owners, CEOs and boards of its clients, with an all-senior team and category exclusivity. In over two decades the firm has created or rebuilt more than 300 brands, 279 of them published as case studies at brandient.com/work — from Romania’s national leaders to brands carried worldwide. The firm has been active in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. The work has earned 84 international awards and distinctions — most recently a Red Dot (2025) and two Graphis Golds (2026) — 64 documented mentions in international design books and publications, and, in 2015, a place among the inaugural inductees of the REBRAND Hall of Fame, alongside Interbrand and MetaDesign.
About Red Dot
Red Dot is one of the world’s largest design competitions — organized since 1955 by Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Essen, Germany, and led since 1991 by Professor Peter Zec, who introduced the red dot label in 1992. Its three disciplines — product design, brands and communication design, and design concept — draw around 18,000 entries a year from more than 70 countries, judged by independent expert juries.
About CoffeEast
CoffeEast is a specialty-coffee festival created in Bucharest with Mihai Panfil, a pioneer of Romania’s specialty-coffee scene — conceived as Eastern Europe’s first — and grown by its second edition to more than 250 exhibitors, some 150 roasters and 50 coffee shops from across the region. Brandient created the brand, recognized with a Red Dot (2025) and a Graphis Gold (2026): the CoffeEast case.