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see the shortlist here

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WINNERS SHOWCASE 2020

Tom Banks, Editor

With lockdown and social distancing forcing unexpected change upon us, it’s a very different Design Week Awards for 2020. In the end the only thing we weren’t able to deliver was a physical awards ceremony, but our team has worked hard on tweaking the entry process and judging, as well as the celebration of our winners, to ensure fairness and maximum exposure. We expanded our entry upload limit and set about organising judging remotely. A rigorous scoring system was put in place which saw projects scored and counter-scored by experts before a series of lengthy Zoom chats were held with head judges. Now the results are in we're excited to share this enhanced online Winners Showcase. Winners and those who made the shortlist will also be receiving an accompanying Winners Showcase book. As part of our efforts to continually evolve our categories, we’ve shaken things up in the digital section for 2020 after consulting with our digital judges. Interaction Design, Best Use of Data and Social Media and Content are all new. In this publication you’ll find a record of winning projects which judges consider to have achieved “design excellence”. Winning work delivers on its brief absolutely, communicates ideas clearly, adds value, perfectly serves its users and shows “design excellence”. The Best of Show, which is always a hard-fought contest, went to the Twitch rebrand by Collins. This gaming streaming platform was rebranded by Collins at an important juncture in the brand’s development. Also the category winner for Identity rebrand, this project wowed judges with its brave direction. The winner of the Social Design category is Useless, by Nice and Serious, which has designed a community website for Londoners looking to locate zero-waste shops and make informed purchasing decisions about sustainable products. Look out for Penguin Books, the winner of Best In House Team. Penguin Creative has stayed relevant by taking the brand to new places while not losing sight of the needs of its core readers by creating engaging book cover illustrations. Bold and experimental illustration and photography has been commissioned for the covers themselves as well as editorial purposes, and Instagram, while the team is also creating video content, all of which feels part of the same family. Scooping the top Digital Installation Prize is The Dark Sky Project by ThoughtFull, for Ngai Tahu Tourism, which is a beautiful exposition of the solar system and the night sky. It has been designed for visitors to explore as an exhibition and understand how the night sky view above them, unpolluted by light, in the Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve, New Zealand, is to be protected and cherished. As well as our category winners you can also find out who this year’s Rising Star is and which two people from the industry we’ve inducted into the Design Week Hall of Fame. Finally, I want to personally congratulate all of the winners, the highly commended projects which ran them close and everyone on the shortlist; remember to get to that stage you still had to beat hundreds of other entrants. I also want to thank our sponsors Berry Place and John Anthony Signs for their support. I wish you all the best through the challenges of 2020 and hope that this time next year the industry will be more sure-footed once again, having adapted and navigated through the worst of the pandemic. Winners, look out for your trophies, they're in the post. If you want to take a photo of you and your trophy at home, tweet @Design_Week and we'll share with our Twitter community.

INTRODUCTION