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.”