awards + competitions

I’ve got no strings. Maurizio Cattelan’s “Daddy Daddy” (2008), which sold for $2.5 million this evening at Phillips de Pury in New York.

• Congratulations are in order for Michael Silverberg, who has been named editor-in-chief of Print. In addition to the magazine, he’ll direct content for the regional design annual competition, Imprint, and Print Books. Silverberg previously served as managing editor of Print.

• Entertainment Weekly is getting a new design director: Kory Kennedy. He’s held the same role at Runner’s World for the past six years and previously worked his design magic for publications such as Spin, Rolling Stone, Interview, and Sports Illustrated. Kennedy starts at EW on May 30.

• The juries have spoken, and on Tuesday evening, the Art Directors Club celebrated the winners of its 91st annual awards at a cocktail-laden gala in New York emceed by John Boiler of 72andSunny. Pulling off the elusive three-peat were a couple of hometown favorites, The New York Times Magazine and the School of Visual Arts, which won the cumulative awards honor in their respective categories (ADC Design Team of the Year and ADC School of the Year) for the third year in a row. Click here for the full listing of winners or better yet, stop by the ADC 91st Annual Awards Exhibition, which opened today at the ADC Gallery and is on view through May 24.
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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Show the world your love of architecture with a t-shirt that supports Architecture for Humanity.

• Can you believe graduation season is upon us? Pratt Institute holds its commencement—the 123rd in its history—this afternoon at Radio City Music Hall. In addition to approximately 1,300 bachelor’s and master’s degrees, honorary degrees will be awarded to artist Ai Weiwei (he’ll accept his doctorate of fine arts via video feed), architect Santiago Calatrava, patron of the arts and education Kathryn C. Chenault, and Philippe de Montebello, director emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Fiske Kimball Professor at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Calatrava will deliver the commencement remarks.

• The Met Ball wasn’t the only black-tie event in town on Monday. Over at Avery Fisher Hall, the focus was on food, not fashion, as Alton Brown emceed the James Beard Foundation awards gala. In the restaurant design category, Bentel & Bentel triumphed for their overhaul of famed Le Bernardin, while graphic gourmand Richard Pandiscio took home the Outstanding Restaurant Graphics medal for his work for the Americano at Hotel Americano. Meanwhile, Jeff Scott‘s two-volume, 900-page Notes from a Kitchen: A Journey Inside Culinary Obsession (Tatroux) was named best photography book.

• And speaking of kitchens, artist and kitchen semiotician Martha Rosler is preparing for her first solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and it’s a doozy. Come mid-November, she’ll transform the museum’s atrium into a giant “meta-monumental” garage sale. That’s where you come in: the general public is invited to donate items—clothes, books, records, toys, costume jewelry, artworks, mementos—for Rosler to sell. Click here for the schedule and collection locations for donations. Why not seize the opportunity to get your artwork into a MoMA show?
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Impossibly dapper Jim Nelson once again left New York’s Marriott Marquis clutching an elephant—the coveted yet unwieldy Alexander Calder stabile pachyderm that signifies a win in the American Society of Magazine Editors’ National Magazine Awards. The GQ editor-in-chief picked up his publication’s second consecutive Ellie for excellence in magazine design, triumphing over a finalist field that consisted of born-again Bloomberg Businessweek (which nabbed a general excellence award), Fabien Baron-ified Interview, New York, and always-on-its-game Wired. We’ll have to wait until Friday to see if GQ‘s double-header will extend to the Society of Publication Designers’ “Magazine of the Year” award. Meanwhile, back at the Ellies, Vogue was honored for overall excellence in magazine photography, although its spooky Steven Klein-lensed “Lady Be Good” portfolio, singled out as a finalist for best feature photography, was bested by those “Vamps, Crooks, and Killers” at The New York Times Magazine. Harper’s won for news and documentary photography with “Juvenile Injustice,” a photo essay by Richard Ross. Other victories of note: TIME was named magazine of the year, Newell Turner‘s freshened-up House Beautiful took home the Elllie for best lifestyle magazine, and the work of the late Christopher Hitchens earned Vanity Fair the award for columns and commentary.

The competition that spotted Stefan Sagmeister, James Victore, and Mike Mills when they were but wee design/art powerhouses-to-be is back for its tenth go-round. Behold Young Guns 10, the Art Directors Club’s international, cross-disciplinary, portfolio-based competition to identify the young creative vanguard. By “young,” they mean 30 or under, and by “creatives,” they mean those doing great things in graphic design, photography, illustration, advertising and art direction, environmental design, film, animation, video, interactive design, object design, and/or typography. What’s so special about Young Guns? It recognizes an individual, and considers a body of work, not a single ad or design. Also, you get a really cool cube if you win. Young Guns 10 is open to ADC members and non-members worldwide (last year’s competition saw entrants from 43 countries). A jury of past ADC Young Guns including Emily Oberman, Mike Bishop, and Jennifer Tzar will select the 50 winners. The regular deadline for entries is May 8, and late entries will be accepted (with a $40 late fee) through May 22, so get cracking. But first watch this mesmerizing video of former Young Guns-made-good such as Scott Stowell getting splashed with black goo in slow motion. This could be you someday.

The jury has spoken, and the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has just announced the winners of the 2012 National Design Awards. We’ll take a closer look at the honorees over the next few days, but in the meantime, here is the full list of winners who will be celebrated on October 17 at a gala dinner at Pier Sixty in New York.

Lifetime Achievement: Richard Saul Wurman

Design Mind: Janine Benyus

Corporate and Institutional Achievement: Design that Matters

Architecture Design: Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects

Communication Design: Rebeca Méndez

Fashion Design: Thom Browne

Interaction Design: Evan Roth

Interior Design: Clive Wilkinson Architects

Landscape Design: Stoss Landscape Urbanism

Product Design: Scott Wilson

The annual AIGA Awards are a little like the Oscars, but with better kerning, bolder eyeglasses, and much less Botox. At this year’s gala celebration, co-chaired by Pentagram’s DJ Stout and Su Mathews of Lippincott, guests were encouraged to wear hats shaped like buildings (make your own with this handy template). We dispatched graphic designer Prescott Perez-Fox to lash a cardboard Eiffel Tower to his head and scope out the scene.

From left, AIGA medalists Ralph Caplan, Robert Vogele, and Elaine Lustig Cohen with AIGA executive director Richard Grefé; reveling designers strike a pose in the urbane photo booth. (Photos: Angela Jimenez for AIGA; Denise Ginley and Steven Robinson)

Much like the return of migrating birds and an elevated pollen count, spring brings with it the design industry’s very own prom, the annual AIGA Awards. Last week’s event, entitled Bright Lights Big City and held in Manhattan at the Altman Building, didn’t make use of the pastel ubiquity of April, but instead opted for a deco-inspired architectural theme, where the entire event was set in black-and-white, referencing the Beaux Arts Ball of 1931 in which architects dressed in costumes of buildings they had designed. This year’s guests were invited to design and create hats in the shape of their favorite buildings, bringing some unexpected wit and levity set against the relative severity of black cocktail attire.

However, the focus of the evening isn’t fashion, it is to honor the newest recipients of the prestigious AIGA medal. This year’s honorees were not simply accomplished design professionals in their own right, but together represent four of the essential archetypes of design. Ralph Caplan represents The Observer, following his career as a design author and having gained the unique ability to find perspective and turn that into something informative and enticing. Elaine Lustig Cohen comes to us as The Artist, creating groundbreaking work in typography and illustration, and raising the status of the designer and of design as a whole. Armin Hoffmann is The Mentor, demonstrated by the generations of design students he taught directly, and the enduring popularity of the Swiss style so closely linked to him. Finally, Robert Vogele embodies The Entrepreneur, demonstrating that classic American story of a regular Joe who created a scrappy upstart that became a thriving business and influential design practice. To the younger designers in the audience, it was inspirational—our challenge is how to embrace these qualities in our careers and become the next archetypes of design.
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Because we’re good and gracious people, we’re not going to cry foul on the Design Museum‘s Design of the Year prize, which just this week awarded its 2012 edition to the studio Barber Osgerby for their work on the London Olympics torch. If we weren’t so wonderful, we’d bring up how convenient it is that the London-based museum is giving the prize to an object related to the event London has spent nearly a decade preparing for, and how that might seem a bit biased (here’s where we might also mention that the London 2012 Velodrome won the architecture category). We then might also bring up that the torch, while very attractive, has such a very limited purpose, and an even shorter shelf life, that maybe something with a bit more longevity and wide-spread usefulness deserves the win. No, instead we are genuinely happy for all the winners (really, honestly, all snark aside), and leave you with a quote by London 2012 Organizing Committee co-chair, Sebastian Coe, about the torch’s big night:

The Torch is one of the most recognizable symbols of the Olympic Games and we are thrilled that our design has won this prestigious title. I am delighted we have such a brilliantly designed, engineered and crafted Torch that will help to celebrate the amazing personal achievements of each of our 8,000 Torchbearers and give them their moment to shine. It is also fantastic news that the stunning architecture of the London 2012 Velodrome has won an award and welcome recognition of the landmark new buildings the Games are bringing to London.

Frederic Goudy had one, so did Philip Johnson and Robert Rauschenberg. The Eameses had two. Pentagram is awash in them. George Lois wears his to bed. We’re talking about AIGA Medals, the graphic design world’s highest honor. This year’s medalists are Ralph Caplan, Elaine Lustig Cohen, Armin Hofmann, and Robert Vogele. Caplan will be honored for his “discerning eye, deftness with words, and wonderful sense of humor toward defining design over half a century through writing, editing, and teaching,” while Lustig Cohen gets the nod for for her integration of “European avant garde and modernist influences into a distinctly American, mid-century manner of typographic communication.” AIGA recognizes Swiss graphic designer Hoffman, who Paul Rand once described as a shape-shifting “daredevil driver, mountain climber, teacher par excellence, and guru,” for his broad and deep influence in “teaching the power and elegance of simplicity and clarity through a timeless aesthetic, always informed by context” while the entrepreneurial Vogele is singled out for having “nurtured the creative potential of generations of Chicago designers, challenging all to think about design for the greater good.” They will be presented with their James Earle Fraser-designed medals tomorrow evening at Bright Lights.

Fellow periodical fiends, take note: the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) has announced the finalists for the 2012 National Magazine Awards. Vice and the visual crack that is the overhauled Bloomberg Businessweek are up against the big boys (The New Yorker, New York, and GQ) for general excellence in the general interest category (how general!), and we’re pleased to see Aperture and House Beautiful also in the general excellence hunt, in the “thought-leader” and lifestyle categories, respectively. Below are the nominees in the design and photo categories, including nods for the Fabien Baron-helmed Interview and Steven Klein‘s Vogue portfolio of a hauntingly retro-chic Amber Valletta and son. Notably absent from the photography fimalists is Martha Stewart Living, which has frequently made the cut in years past. We’ve denoted 2011 winners (if re-nominated in that category) with an asterisk. The winners will be announced and receive their elephantine Alexander Calder-designed statuettes on May 3 in New York City.
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The competition that spotted Stefan Sagmeister, James Victore, and Mike Mills when they were but wee design/art powerhouses-to-be is back for its tenth go-round. Behold Young Guns 10, the Art Directors Club‘s international, cross-disciplinary, portfolio-based competition to identify the young creative vanguard. By “young,” they mean 30 or under, and by “creatives,” they mean those doing great things in graphic design, photography, illustration, advertising and art direction, environmental design, film, animation, video, interactive design, object design, and/or typography. What’s so special about Young Guns? It recognizes an individual, and considers a body of work, not a single ad or design. Also, you get a really cool cube if you win. Young Guns 10 is open to ADC members and non-members worldwide (last year’s competition saw entrants from 43 countries). A jury of past ADC Young Guns including Emily Oberman, Mike Bishop, and Jennifer Tzar will select the 50 winners. The early-bird deadline is April 17, so hurry up. But first, watch this mesmerizing video of former Young Guns-made-good such as Scott Stowell getting splashed with black goo in slow motion. This could be you someday.