The National Design Award, given by the Smithsonian National Design Museum and designed by William Drenttel, is based on the dimensionalization of the asterisk symbol.
The proliferation of awards shows and gala awards evenings in our cultural
calendars means that almost every evening, someone, somewhere,
is carrying home an award that says, “You like me, you really really
like me!” In the film industry alone, the Academy Awards vies with the
Golden Globes, the SAG Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards, the
Directors Guild Awards, and dozens of others.
Despite rumors that some awards are used for purposes other than
that for which they were designed (there is at least one Emmy recipient
who uses his statuette as a toilet paper holder), most awards hold a place
of honor and are proudly displayed
as symbols of recognition
and accomplishment.
The Oscar is widely acknowledged
as a winner in award design
—sleek and elegant, easy to
grasp and hoist in triumph. But
some awards are not as well conceived
or executed ... they are unwieldy,
awkward, sharp-edged,
even dangerous.
Design guru George Lois
says that “most awards are goddamned
ugly. But the Oscar is
the best-looking one. It’s not very
conceptual, though ... nobody
knows who Oscar is.”
The Oscar was designed in 1928 by Cedric Gibbons, an art
director at MGM. From Gibbons’ sketches of a male nude holding
a sword, standing on a reel of film with five spokes representing
the different constituencies in the motion picture industry, sculptor
George Stanley fashioned the prototype for Oscar. Scott Siegel,
president of R.S. Owens, which has manufactured the award
for the last 23 years, says the statuette weighs 8.5 lbs. and is made of
a high-grade pewter base with four layers of electroplating atop the
base: first nickel, then copper, then silver, and finally, 24K gold.
In contrast to the monochromatic metal of most awards, Milton Glaser’s iridescent cubist portrait of Shakespeare, the award given by the Theater For a New Audience, is positively giddy. Photograph by Matthew Klein ©2006
Massimo Vignelli, a legendary designer who has, like Lois, won
many awards, concurs that most of the mainstream awards “are
badly designed, because they are corny and unimaginative ... they
try to have too many meanings and are not conceptual at all. The
Tony Award is a complicated thing with a globe ... but, compared
to the others, the Oscar is OK.”
Vignelli and Lois have designed quite a few awards between
them, and both agree that they prefer a conceptual rather than a
literal approach. When asked whether design awards tend to be
better designed than others, Vignelli agreed that, generally speaking,
they are much better, “especially than those in the entertainment
industry, which tend to be gross.”
“I have received some wonderful awards from international
design organizations,” says Vignelli. “A beautiful cone of marble
from the Art Directors Club of Italy, for example. The cube award
of the ADC here [New York] is also nice. An award doesn’t have to
be meaningful; it can be a beautiful object, a piece of sculpture.”
“For a company in Italy, I designed an award by commissioning
the sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, who created a . at square,”
Vignelli continues. “An award should have an intellectual elegance,
which has value in itself. It should be a work of art.”
Vignelli’s award for the Society of Publication Designers is a
simple folded page, sitting at a 90-degree angle. “A publication has
many pages,” he explains. “Once you fold a piece of paper, it has
four pages, and then it is a minimal publication.” His design for
the Rockefeller Award from the Museum of Modern Art, given
every year to outstanding personalities, is similarly minimalist.
TOP: The New York Art Directors Club Award in the shape of a cube was designed by Gene Federico in 1976.
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