FAQ Entry #287

This is a respond to a previously asked question about the A' Design Award and Competition. The full list of frequently asked questions can be accessed here.

#287: I'm feeling pretty let down currently, In looking at the adesignaward page toady I realize that works with much lower scores than mine are being featured, please explain.

A' Design Award & Competition jury evaluates works based on strict guidelines and evaluation criteria, and each jury member spends considerable amount of time to check the nominated designs' details, documentation, images and textual description. This throughout inspection helps jury members to understand and evaluate the nominated designs in a fair manner. Awarded designs are communicated to press members worldwide, the communication process has two phases. The initial phase is called the initial / general PR Campaign which starts after results announcement and continues throughout the year, with a high intensity in the first three months. During this initial phase we do not pitch specific works, but we highlight and share the category based press kits which includes all winner works. We also sponsor posts and content at several publications annually, but we do not impose any particular winners' works at the initial PR Campaign, at this step, we ask press members to choose what they truly like. It is important that the press members choose the works to feature themselves; because when editors freely choose the content & designers to feature without any control, their articles becomes more organic and they are shared more, and their audience interacts more with the content. This additional interaction and organic nature of the articles benefits all winners since many readers who check a featured work through a press article referral, do also check the list of winners and other winning works. But of course, in some cases, there is indeed an innate discrepancy about the way press and jury members picks the best designs; as explained earlier, the jury chooses designs on merit, and the jury spends considerable time on the entries, evaluation of jury is dependent on professional factors. On the other hand, press members choose works differently, from experience works that are provoking, surprising, highly aesthetic or even odd could be featured. To decrease this discrepancy, we have press members in the jury panel, however once a press member becomes jury, she or he spends more time with the designs, therefore having a higher appreciation and understanding of the evaluated designs; this leads to a behavioral change; the jury member press member votes more like an expert or connoisseur; with a higher emphasis on merit, rather than aesthetic appeal, thus the discrepancy even is offset slightly, still exists. To improve the success rate (feature rate) for the nominated designs, we also provide submission and post-competition guidelines to entrants, however most participants do actually not follow out guidelines and do not make use of the tools that we spend days to perfect, those who follow the guidelines are more likely to be featured, to summarize, the submission requires to prepare the images in a way convenient for press members to integrate to their magazines, and the post-competition guidelines and tools such as the press survey and designer interview shall also be filled, both are highly important for the second stage of the PR Campaign which relates to individual design pitching. The second phase of the Winners' PR campaign starts with a press-kit preparation, for this purpose we ask designers to fill more information, and provide additional images. In addition, we ask winners to fill the magazine-publication survey, we simply ask the award winners which publications they would want to be featured at, afterwards we contact these publications and share the winners' press kits with them, but again we have little control on what the press would actually feature. So there is also the final phase, which is about translation of your award winning works to many other languages in order to reach further international audiences and also we have publications, platforms, rankings and channels of our own where we publish all design award winner works. But we would like to state that the PR Campaign is always on; there are many examples of late-discoveries where a design could get a lot of attention and coverage after years of award announcement, and it is too early to be let down two weeks after results announcement for features, to remind you we also pitch printed, traditional, offline publications, and they need at least 2 months to feature any work; since unlike online, digital publications they are usually published once a month and their edition contents are prepared several weeks in advance. But please do contact us, and provide feedback, and let us know if we can do anything specific to get your award winning featured more, we will do it.

Keywords: featuring at publications, did not get featured, no feature, no press, not enough publicity

The following questions could be related:

• #281: I am a little disappointed to see that my wining packaging product, was not in any of the major publications after 24 hours from results announcement.

If you did not find your answer, please feel free to check the faq pages for more questions and answers. You will also want to check our webpage for details; thanks to our transparency policy, we document and publish everything.