NZ’s best graphic and interactive designs recognised at the 2011 Best Design Awards

Fans designed their own paint jobs for the cars, uploading their creations to social networking sites in order to win votes, with the design with the most  votes being put onto an actual race car and driven in a big race.

For the first time ever in the history of the Best Design Awards, not one but two designs were awarded the coveted Purple Pin (supreme award) for graphic design, brushing off stiff competition from a record beating, not-to-be-scoffed at 409 graphic entries. 

Nabbing one of the two supreme graphic accolades was Auckland based design firm Alt Group,
who was presented the prize for their design of Fisher & Paykel’s the Social Kitchen, with Wellington based designer Sarah Maxey and typographer Kris Sowersby scoring the second graphic Purple Pin for Sentimental Journey.

The Social Kitchen was a pop-up installation at Britomart created in collaboration with chefs Natalia Schamroth and Carl Koppenhagen of the  Engine Room, furniture designer Sam Haughton of IMO and the Fisher & Paykel team for the 2011 Urbis Designday event.

Featuring two kitchen displays within a modified shipping container, a  one-off custom table seating 50 people under a ‘blow up’ cube, and a series of classic New Zealand dishes reinvented, the Social Kitchen was designed to showcase the best in New Zealand appliance engineering and design and demonstrate the evolving role of the kitchen as the social  hub in Kiwis everyday lives.

Described by the judges as an “artfully coordinated event”, the Social Kitchen project saw Alt Group design everything from wait staff uniforms, pole based severing platters which were custom designed for  each of the different dishes on offer, a menu, which was presented on t-shirts and a newspaper and video documenting the design process of each contributor from ideation to delivery.

Sentimental Journey was a project devised by three friends: a typeface designer, a graphic artist and a poet. It is an interpretation of the Exquisite Corpse game, invented by the Surrealists in the early part of last century, where a collection of words is collectively assembled for the entertainment and amusement of the audience, rather like the old parlour game, Consequences. 

In this version poet Kate Camp chose a collection of two word phrases. She split them, and sent half to designer Sarah Maxey and half to typographer Kris Sowersby, who then worked independently using their respective skills in typeface design and handlettering to design each word. Each revealed their designs and words to the other at the end of the project. 

The words were combined with humorous and eye-catching consequences, such as Sentimental Journey, Love Heart, I Do (with the I being a drawing of an eye) and Screw You. The result is a limited edition set of 20 postcards, available from the Village Foundry website  in New York.

While they didn’t take out the top prize, Auckland and Christchurch based Strategy Design and Advertising had plenty of reasons to celebrate – 25 in fact – with the company scoring more awards than any other company at this year’s event. 

Of their impressive 25 strong prize haul – two awards of which were presented in the spatial design discipline – the company scooped five Gold Pins, five Silver and 15 Bronze awards, with five of their awards presented for Share an Idea, a campaign developed for Christchurch City Council that encouraged the public to submit ideas on how Christchurch could rebuild after the quake. 

The campaign, which kicked off just 10 weeks after the destructive 6.3 earthquake of February 22nd, gathered a remarkable 106,000 ideas in six weeks for the Christchurch central city redevelopment plan.

Other awards were presented to the company for their work for Kawerau, Camper Shoes and for their design of Kiwi chef Martin Bosley’s book, which one of the judges described as “unashamed visual food porn”. “I salivated like a teenager over each centrefold,” said the judge of the book design.

Other high profile graphic and interactive design winners at this year’s event included Alt Group, who in addition to taking home the top graphic design prize walked away with 22 other prizes (three of which were Gold Pins); Christchurch based Sons & Co, who won four interactive design Gold Pins and three Silver awards; DNA Design, who won 12 awards; Assembly, who picked up two of the 27 Gold Pins awarded across the two design disciplines for their work on the Pams and Freeview TV commercials; Clemenger BBDO, who won nine awards, including a Gold Pin for their design of Radio New Zealand’s quirky ‘Sounds Like Us’ poster campaign, and Special Group, who were awarded 10 design prizes, including 2 Gold Pins. Their packaging designs for Ecostore took out the top packaging honors winning a Gold and a Silver, and their creation and launch of new TV channel FOUR, which covered everything from on-screen graphics through to a 30ft Yellow Duck also won a Gold and a Silver. 

Organised by the Designers Institute of New Zealand, the Best Design Awards were established in 1988 and have been held annually since 1996.