Core77 Design Awards

Core77 Design Awards

An Annual Celebration of Excellence, Enterprise and Intent

Recognizing excellence in all areas of design enterprise, the Core77 Design Awards celebrates the richness of the design profession and its practitioners. Dedicated jury teams around the world will judge 15 categories of design endeavor with the top professional and student entries winning the inaugural trophy, and Winners, Runners Up, and Notable entries published in the Awards Gallery and across the Core77 online network. So ready your best work and put yourself out there.

It all starts here.

The Awards come in a variety of flavors, choose yours...

• Products / Equipment
• Soft Goods / Apparel
• Furniture / Lighting
• Interiors / Exhibition
• Graphics / Branding / Identity
• Packaging
• Interactive / Web / Mobile
• Service Design
• Transportation
• Design for Social Impact
• Design Education Initiative
• Strategy / Research
• Speculative Objects / Concepts
• DIY / Hack / Mod
• Never Saw the Light of Day

Get the Poster

Register to enter early and receive the limited-edition Core77 Design Awards poster, designed by Studio Lin.

Follow Us

Watch and Learn

Watch these example videos from leading designers to get inspiration for making your own.

Meet the Jury

From Tokyo to Turin, San Francisco to Sydney, our global-local teams of jurors are eagerly awaiting your best work.

The Inaugural Trophy

Designed by Rich Brilliant Willing, all Professional and Student winners receive the inaugural trophy and the unique ability to spread the credit widely.

March 9, 2011 · Poster

Register Now to Enter and Get the Limited-Edition Poster by Studio Lin!

We are honored to have worked with Studio Lin in establishing the identity for the Core77 Design Awards, and one of the amazing things they created is the poster you see above. It looks fantastic, its got the C77DA Style Guide on it, and we'd love to send you one of your own! All you have to do is register right now and we'll send you a complimentary poster – it only takes a moment and you can come back to do the next step of submitting your entry anytime before the entry deadline. The posters are limited edition so don't wait! REGISTER HERE

Studio Lin is the graphic design practice of Alex Lin. His work has been featured and awarded by leading design publications such as Wallpaper, ID Magazine,Print Magazine, Metropolis, Surface, Architectural Record, and exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. Past Clients and Collaborators include OMA, Artechnica Inc, and Google. VISIT STUDIO LIN

March 8, 2011 · Video Testimonials

Video On Demand

We’re introducing a few new elements to our awards program, not the least of which is adding a show-and-tell-style “video testimonial” to the entry component. Although it’s optional, we strongly encourage entrants to take advantage of this opportunity to give the jury a direct and personal perspective on your work, and to basically tell them what’s really awesome about your design.

For inspiration and edification, we asked four designers to give us their take on the video testimonial.

Dror Benshetrit of Studio Dror narrates his way through a screencast tour of his latest innovation, the QuaDror construction system.

Becky Stern, Associate Editor of Make: Online and CRAFT, explains the components and construction of her amazing TV-B-Gone jacket, a wearable television remote control.

Writer/designer/developer Craig Mod discusses his moment-capturing protocol, Hitotoki, in an interview conducted with a friend on the opposite coast.

Lavrans Løvlie, Director of the Norway-based firm braves the elements to share with us LiveWork’s service design for Oslo’s new public library.

Quick Tips for your video testimonial:

• Keep the setting as straightforward and informal as you want it to be.
• Make it personal. This is your story told your way. It should have a healthy dose of Point of View and be compelling to watch.
• Hit the following points:

1. What you were trying to do when you were designing your project.
2. What’s great about it, what separates it from what’s already out there, and why it deserves the world’s attention.

• Have fun while you’re doing it! This is supposed to be a delightful, informative and personal addition to the required entry materials.

Visit our Making a Video section for full details and start planning your 2-and-a-half minutes of fame!

March 8, 2011 · Jury

Who Are the Jury In Your Neighborhood?

Meet our 15 Jury Captains who are heading up the judging of the Core77 Design Awards. Each of them brings a wealth of expertise and thought leadership to their judging category and we’re very honored that they have chosen to participate in our awards. Instead of bringing everyone to one location, we took a new approach to assembling the jury, distributing the field globally. No plane fuel, more legroom. Our Jury Captains are based in 13 cities spread around eight countries. Each will recruit four people from their area to form a locally-based multidisciplinary Jury Team. They get to do the judging in their own location, and we’ll provide the snacks. Once their results are finalized and validated, the teams will reconvene for a live web broadcast revealing their Winners, Runners-up and Notables, and the reasoning behind their choices. And they’ll do it all without jet lag.

We are pleased then to present our inaugural line-up of Jury Captains:

Products: Julie Lasky, Editor of Change Observer, New York, USA

Soft Goods / Apparel: Peter Kallen, Design Director of NAU, Portland, Oregon, USA

Furniture / Lighting: Max Fraser, Editor & Publisher of London Design Guide, London, United Kingdom

Graphics/Branding/Identity: Steven Heller, author/commentator, and Co-Chair of the MFA Designer as Author at the School of Visual Arts, New York, USA

Packaging: Mark Christou, Creative Director of Pearlfisher, New York, USA

Interiors/Exhibition: Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham architecture (KDa), Tokyo, Japan

Interactive/Web /Mobile: Jon Kolko, Executive Director of Design Strategy at Thinktiv and Founder & Director of Austin Center for Design, Austin, Texas, USA

Transportation: Lars Holme Larsen, Co-Founder of KiBiSi and Founder of Kilo Design, Copenhagen, Denmark

Service Design: Fran Samalionis, Innovation Coach of BT Financial Group, Sydney, Australia

Design for Social Impact: Ashoke Chatterjee, development volunteer and Former Director, National Institute of Design (India), Ahmedabad, India

Strategy/Research: Mark Vanderbeeken, Senior Partner, Strategic Communications at Experientia, Turin, Italy

Design Education Initiative: Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, Associate Professor in Design Anthropology and Associate Dean, Learning and Teaching at Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia

DIY/Hack/Mod: Christy Canida, Community & Marketing Director of Instructables, and Eric J. Wilhelm, CEO of Instructables and Co-Founding Partner of Squid Labs, San Francisco, CA

Speculative Objects/Concepts: Branko Lukic, Founding Partner of NONOBJECT, Palo Alto, California, USA

Never Saw the Light of Day: Aric Chen, design journalist and Creative Director of Beijing Design Week, Beijing, China

Click here to read their full bios.

March 8th, 2011 · Announcement

We've Arrived (and It's About Time)!

Welcome to the inaugural Core77 Design Awards! For the past 16 years we've been celebrating outstanding design and designers across a wide array of disciplines. Now we're proud to provide a global platform that honors the very brightest, boldest and most impactful work on an annual basis. We hope to set new standards for design awards by leveraging online scale, increasing transparency and decreasing plane fuel. We're opening the field to 15 categories, recognizing the emerging disciplines of Design for Social Impact, Design Education Initiatives, DIY and our intriguing "Never Saw the Light of Day." The submission process is online and allows designers the opportunity to show off their pitching skills by uploading a 2-minute-30-second video as part of their entry (it's optional but advisable).

Our jury system also gives the judging process a new twist. Rather than put each jury member on a plane and fly them to one location, we have selected a head judge for each of the categories (we call them "Jury Captains"). Based in different cities around the world, each captain will select four local experts (within train, bike or jogging distance) to join them in the evaluation process as a unified jury team. Not only that, these teams of jurors will reveal their winning choices via live web broadcasts. With jury teams in time zones as diverse as London, Tokyo, Sydney and Ahmenabad, we're looking forward to announcement parties at all hours of the day and night.

Meanwhile, the design team of Rich Brilliant Willing are hard at work making an award as innovative as the awards program itself. Thirty trophies will be awarded in total; one each of the Professional and Student winners of each category. Stay tuned to Core77 over the next two months as we document the evolution of this year's trophy!

So tell your friends, compile your materials and enter the work that you're proud of. We're ready and waiting!