Powdered wigs: day two at the ADC awards

Since these five logos had made it to the final round, they were technically "winners." However, since so many of us felt they were poor, a vote and discussion was held to consider entirely removing them and the category from this year's awards. We came to the conclusion that the idea of branding is shifting from the idea of a singular image or logo representing a company to one in which the idea of a campaign — where the logo is but a small piece — dominates corporate think. And as such, we hoped, the whole of logo design had become weaker. To be honest, those five pieces we had sitting before us were downright embarrassing; they were C level work on a sophomore college level at best. If the ADC awards were to represent the best of the best, and if these five were supposed to be the best, then we felt we were all in trouble.

We discussed this dilemma for about 30 or 40 minutes, eventually concluding that an essay on this issue should replace the entries for the category in this year's book. It should be interesting to see how they resolve this issue formally.

Many of the judges felt a lot of the third round pieces — technical winners — should have never made it. We almost went back and performed a "judges pick" nomination round, but the logistics — sifting through 4,000 entries now boxed up and in disarray — would have been impossible. One piece in particular that I wanted to win but which didn't even make it past the first round was a Japanese poster for an architecture exhibition at Ma, a gallery located in Tokyo. It was printed large and beautifully and contained small reproductions of floor-plans from houses all over the country. It was simple and clean in its execution, and was a great combination of content that made you want to stick your nose against the paper and elegant form.

I think one of the reasons it may not have made it was because nobody could read the text. Which brings up a good question: What precisely were we judging? If you can't read the text of an entry, you can obviously only judge form. And if we're talking about design — arguably an art form that deals with the intersection of information and aesthetics — then how can you judge form without taking into account content? This is probably why, throughout the competition, I felt incredibly conflicted, almost as if what we were doing was incomplete in some respects. All I know is that there were several instances in which I translated bits of text for people and it changed their outlook. Some pieces came with translations written on paper and taped above the portions of the native text. But for other pieces, this sort of simultaneous translation was untenable and would have destroyed the aesthetics of the piece entirely.

We didn't reach a conclusion on this issue of being content-blind. Again, in my opinion, design is not purely aesthetics, and the fact that a competition like this can only focus (for the most part) on aesthetics is a fault that should be recognized.

All in all, despite the bumps we may have run into, the competition was a blast, and getting to listen in on the workings of the minds of designers from all facets of the industry was a humbling and educational experience. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat.

update: Notes from day one