Ronnie Saini Design

AIGA’s suite of competitions is widely recognized as the most discerning statement on design excellence today, extending a legacy that began more than 90 years ago. By means of the competitions, AIGA creates an authoritative chronicle of outstanding design solutions, each demonstrating the process of designing, the role of the designer and the value of design.

The selections in AIGA’s annual competition represent the best work across all disciplines of communication design and strategy, as chosen by a distinguished jury of design peers.

Be a part of the legacy. To enter “AIGA: 365 Annual Design Competitions 31,” your work must be designed, produced and used in the marketplace between January 1 and December 31, 2009.

Follow six easy steps to enter your work

1. Select a channel according to what your entry actually is—a brochure, a logo, a website, etc.
2. Select a medium.
3. Select a category.
4. Upload a JPEG of your entry.
5. Submit payment and print forms.
6. Send actual work and forms to AIGA.

How to enter:

• Entries may include:
  • print and television advertisements,
  • interactive website banners or animations,
  • giveaways,
  • posters,
  • invitations,
  • announcements,
  • direct mail, and
  • guerrilla/unconventional advertising.
• Pieces may be entered individually or as a series.
• Submit actual samples.
• Submit magazine and newspaper advertisements as complete tear sheets, unmounted and trimmed, as they originally appeared.
• For posters, always submit the actual piece.
• If you are submitting a website that will be publicly available online at the time the entries are judged, please include the URL as well as 4 to 6 images from the project as letter-size color printouts. If the URL will not be active, a site may be submitted on CDs or DVDs. All digital media entries submitted on disk should be self-contained applications or launch within an offline browser.
• Please label all disks and videotapes with your name and telephone number.

Submission requirements

Eligibility

• Work in all media that has been designed, produced and used in the marketplace between January 1 and December 31 of the previous year is eligible.
• School projects are not eligible.
• Following AIGA’s membership in Icograda (International Council of Graphic Design Associations) and in keeping with a deepening commitment to demonstrating the importance of diversity, entries from all countries will be eligible for AIGA competitions for the first time in AIGA’s history. In order for the jury to understand the content and context, entries that are in languages other than English must include a brief English translation.
• Submit only actual work; no photographs accepted.
• We regret that entries and disks cannot be returned.

Entries must be accompanied by:

• A master registration form (you can fill in and print out entry forms from the competitions website)
• Two separate, fully completed entry forms for each entry
• Payment receipt or offline payment form and check or money order, in U.S. funds. Make checks payable to “AIGA Competitions.” Any brokerage and custom fees on foreign entries must be prepaid. AIGA will reject entries that are sent collect.

Requirements

• Posters must always be submitted as the actual piece, even if oversized.
• Magazine and newspaper designs, print advertisements and editorials should be submitted as complete unmounted tear sheets. If you are submitting a complete issue, you do not need to separate it into tear sheets.
• Logos must be printed in color on a letter-size sheet and mounted on one-ply board; please note the purpose on the lower-right corner (e.g., “for bakery,” “for record label”).
• Packaging (including music CDs) must always be submitted as actual pieces, even if oversized.
• Signage and environments must be submitted as QuickTime video on CD or DVD, especially if the project involves moving or electronic components. Do not send photographs, slides or transparencies.
• Stationery systems can include one each of unmounted letterhead, business card and envelope (the complete system counts as one entry).
• Television broadcast graphics, film and video graphics, and animations will be accepted in QuickTime video on CD or DVD. You can include several individual entries on one disk, as long as they are to be judged in the same category.
• All disks must be labeled with entrant’s name and telephone number.
• Please do not include your company name in the actual entry.
• Interactive media entries (computer graphics, games, interfaces, etc.) need to be submitted as a URL if the entry can be viewed on a browser; otherwise must be submitted on DVD or CD. Please send a color printout of four different screens from the project together with the disk and a list of technical requirements for proper viewing.
• Website entries must include full address of the site on the entry form, as well as a color printout of four different screens from the project. If the site will not be live by the time of the judging, please send a complete working version on DVD or CD. If the jurors will need a username and password to access the submission, you must include this information as a PDF or Word file in the same disk.

Fees

Variations of one entry (e.g., packaging for different flavors or sizes of same product, the different components of a stationery system) are considered a single entry.

Series entries comprise systems of three or more applications (e.g., identity, annual report, signage, television advertisement and website) for the same client and project, to be judged collectively as one entry in the same category.

If you want an entry to be judged in more than one category, you must provide a separate sample of the piece, with the corresponding entry forms and entry fee for each category in which you want the piece to be judged.

Notification

Selected entries

Notification letters will be sent by the end of June. The list of the jury’s selections will be posted on the AIGA website by the beginning of July.

If you are notified that the jurors have selected your entry, we will require four additional copies of it. These copies are archived at the Denver Art Museum and displayed in the AIGA’s New York exhibition and subsequent traveling shows. We regret that additional copies of the entries cannot be returned. Please refrain from submitting an entry if you will be unable to send us four additional copies of it if selected.

Production fees

There is a production fee of $40 for members, $60 for nonmembers, per selected entry, payable after notification of selection. This fee offsets part of AIGA’s production costs for inclusion of your work in the AIGA Design Archives.

Permission to reproduce work

By submitting work to the competitions, the entrant acknowledges the right of AIGA to use accepted work for reproduction in competitions-related publications; on its website; in the ensuing exhibition of the competitions’ selections; and for educational and AIGA-related promotional purposes. Television, film and video graphics will be duplicated by AIGA for exhibition purposes and for inclusion in the AIGA Design Archives.

Color Hunter is an amazing tool to create and find colors from images. Enter the URL of an image or even upload any image to get a color palette that matches the image. This is useful for coming up with a website color palette that matches a key image a client wants to work with.

November 11–14, 2009
Aspen Meadows, Colorado

The 2009 Aspen Design Summit, a partnership of AIGA and the Winterhouse Institute, will be held at Aspen Meadows from November 11–14. This year’s invitation-only event is made possible by generous support from The Rockefeller Foundation.

The Aspen Design Summit is an interdisciplinary, global workshop of designers, NGO decision makers, corporate leaders, and experts who work together to design human-centered solutions to problems that challenge the quality of life. The projects are those that benefit real people without the means to address impediments to human dignity and achievement. The projects may benefit people directly or the environment on which human activity depends.

About Aspen and IDCA

Chicago industrialist Walter Paepcke founded the International Design Conference in Aspen more than fifty years ago. He and his wife Elizabeth envisioned Aspen as a place where leaders from throughout the world could gather to share ideas. Their vision was first realized in 1949 when the Goethe Bicentennial celebration attracted more than 2,000 people to Aspen to honor the 200th birthday of Goethe, the great German humanist. Albert Schweitzer opened the convocation.

In 1951, two years after the Goethe Bicentennial, Paepcke established the IDCA as an opportunity to bring together designers, artists, engineers, business and industry leaders. That first June, some 250 attendees and their families assembled for four days of presentations on the theory and practice of design. The title, “Design as a Function of Management,” was chosen to ensure the participation of the business community.

The IDCA, along with the Aspen Institute and the Aspen Music Festival and School, grew out of the Paepckes’ belief that Aspen provided an ideal environment for nurturing the whole human being. Isolated from the distractions of urban life and inspired by the abundant natural beauty of the Colorado Rockies, people could take advantage of Aspen’s recreational, intellectual and cultural resources. They would return home renewed in “body, mind and spirit,” a concept that has come to be known as “The Aspen Idea.” Today, Aspen is renowned for its wide range of cultural activities and opportunities for learning.

AIGA and the IDCA

In 2004, the IDCA board recognized that its design conference had been so successful over the years in raising awareness of design and its role in business and society that many other similar conferences had been launched to advance this essential discourse. The IDCA collaborated with AIGA, the professional association for design, to protect the legacy of the IDCA by raising the funds and making arrangements for the archives of the first fifty years (and subsequent ones) to enter the collection (and curatorial care) of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

At the same time, it was decided that the pioneering spirit of the IDCA, in a 21st century form, would involve demonstrating the role of creativity in defeating habit in society’s response to the larger issues threatening humanity. The IDCA was transformed from a conference to a smaller summit, in which design thinking guided the integration of concerns and solutions, often presented in the context of broader forums of decision makers, like the Aspen Ideas Festival or the World Economic Forum, instead of in the form of a design conference.

AIGA is now responsible for sustaining the contribution originally engendered by the IDCA.

Past events

The 2005 Aspen Design Summit was an invitational event held in Aspen by the leadership of the International Design Conference in Aspen (IDCA) in partnership with AIGA as an opportunity to rethink the form and relevance of a design gathering in a world facing serious challenges.

The 2006 Aspen Design Summit, building on the formative outcomes of the previous Summit, drew a diverse group of design-minded leaders from around the world to work on problems in education, woman-empowerment in the third world, post-Katrina recycling efforts, water requirements in Africa, and sustainable development in urban America.