JURISPRUDENCE
In May 2005, the six-person jury secreted
themselves in Adobe’s corporate offices in
San Jose, emerging a day and a half later with
a list of 26 finalists, nine of them winners.
“The students are good,” says jury member
Gail Anderson, senior art director, SpotCo,
New York. “Really good—frighteningly
good. They’ve grown up alongside the technology,
so they’ve got the technical advantage
that an older designer just can’t have.”
Judges were also impressed with students’
depth of conceptual thinking. “It was
not only something we were looking for,”
says jury member Dava Guthmiller, creative
director, Noise 13, San Francisco, “but
something students were delivering.”
The judges were less impressed, however,
with students’ lack of attention to typography.
“There are never enough students
making type talk,” says Anderson. The interactive
category, falling short on interactivity,
also left the jury underwhelmed. As a result,
they identified only two finalists in interactive
design, rather than the three entries honored
in all other categories. Although judge
Matthew Richmond, principal of The Chopping
Block, New York, says he saw a host of
things he wished he’d done, the category’s deficiencies overall led him to “question whether
schools are encouraging their students to consider
what’s different about a medium that’s
interactive versus print. A good website answers
the question, ‘What is it about this medium
that can’t be done with any other?’ That’s
the kind of stuff I’d like to see in the future.”
Adobe takes the counsel of its jury seriously.
The day after the ceremony, several judges held
court with the ADAA’s nine-person advisory
board, implementing a few category modifications
to better organize next year’s entries. But
it was when judges hashed out their concerns
about the self-expression category—defined as
“personal, theoretical, or self-promotion work
in any number of different media not intended
for use by clients”—that things got interesting.
It started innocently enough, when, during
the judging, the jury began to realize that
many students were treating the self-expression
category as “a clearinghouse for projects
that were too hard to categorize otherwise,”
says Anderson. “And in some cases, I think the
entrants just got lazy or thought they’d have a
better chance if they sent in something artsy.”
KLAAS NEUMANN—DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION
University of Applied Sciences (Hamburg, Germany)
Jury member Gail Anderson says the polished presentation of Klaas Neumann’s
entry impressed her, “but it was the depth of the piece, conceptually, that blew me
away.” The infographic—a nine-panel, schematic timeline—outlines the evolution
of German business attire from the 12th to the 21st century. But Neumann adds another
layer of pictorial narrative with his iconography of the textile production process,
including symbols of spinning wheels, looms, tailor’s scissors, and sewing
machines. “You have to explore the poster in a nonlinear way,” says Neumann, “and
use your own experience and imagination to understand the content.” Viewers who
do so are rewarded with an astonishingly rich history of trade and industry through
the ages. In the panel representing the 15th century, for example, a medieval businessman
wears a turban to evoke Eastern influences on culture during this period
of expanded trade. A steam engine icon, which appears in the 19th century, calls to
mind not just advancements in textile production but the industrial revolution itself.
Neumann, who works as a graphic artist for the Financial Times Deutschland, will continue
producing his comic books for a German comic anthology while finishing his
degree (www.orang-magazin.net).
ANDREAS GASCHKA—BROADCAST DESIGN
University of Applied Sciences (Mainz, Germany)
Andreas Gaschka’s professor asked students to turn the text of a poem into a
piece of type animation. But Gaschka never did connect with poetry, and decided to
search for some other source of inspiration. Daydreaming on the bus, he realized a
traffic report would be the thing: “Traffic reports have a great rhythm, jumping from
one traffic scene to another, and showing the whole scene at once in the end.” Which
is, of course, exactly what his film does, sweeping across an animated map as a German
radio announcer reads the advisories. Gaschka, who hopes to intern at a post
production or motion design studio when school begins, will graduate in two years,
at which point he’d like “to jump into serious motion graphics business, and do fancy
work for interesting clients.” Humble to the end, Gaschka said he realized the call
would be close when he saw the quality of his ADAA competitors’ work. As he took
the stage to accept his award, “I had this feeling like walking on clouds.”
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