We are excited to announce that entries are now open for the Design Week Awards 2021, which will bring winning work to our biggest ever audience.
With so much uncertainty around live, real world events this coming year, we have taken an early decision to again celebrate award winning work across Design Week and its online channels, rather than through a live event.
In 2020, reacting to a rapidly changing situation, we moved our celebrations online and in doing so showcased your work in a more interactive way and got it in front of more people.
Bigger reach
This year we will be building on these successes so that the Design Week Awards has an even bigger reach, allowing winners to discover new opportunities.
Having undertaken a major overhaul of categories in recent years to make them as relevant to your work as possible, this year we are tweaking them so that they can reflect the challenges already faced and those that lie ahead.
The designing of spaces has changed
If you work in sectors covered in our Spaces section: Exhibition; Retail; Wayfinding and Environmental Graphics; Hospitality; and Workplace your work is likely to have been disrupted.
In recognition of this we have adapted the entry criteria for these categories. This means entries will be judged against their brief and long term goals, notwithstanding any COVID interruption.
On the other hand if your entry has been specifically designed with COVID compliancy in mind, it will be judged on this basis. This might apply to any of the categories coming under Spaces.
Some exhibitions did go ahead as planned in 2020, but where they have been repurposed as online experiences in response to opening restrictions, these can also be entered into this category.
Every facet of branding
Our Communication section reflects the broad nature of modern branding work with specific awards for Identity Launches and Identity Rebrands, 2D Packaging – Graphics and 3D Structural Packaging, as well Brand Strategy, Writing for Design and more.
Digital as you understand it
The Digital section was reassessed last year following some consultation with leading designers. It has allowed us to think less in terms of outputs (like Website Design) and more in terms of the beauty and craft of front end experiences. To this end our Interaction Design category celebrates digital product design that engages with end users in a meaningful way and provides a valuable user experience.
Products and Furniture
The Products and Furniture section is where you will find consumer and industrial product design as separate categories alongside Furniture Design.
Landmark awards
You’ll find categories including Social Design where we are looking to recognise the achievements of design for good, and Service Design where judges will be looking at measurable improvements to services, in our Landmark awards section.
Here you’ll also find Best In-House Team, Rising Star (which is free to enter) and Designing out COVID-19. This will cover any design or design intervention which has mitigated risk, helped encourage positive behaviour change and even saved lives. This might be a physical product, digital product, example of communication design or service design. It could be a change to an existing physical environment.
Soon we’ll be able to announce our biggest ever judging panel consisting of more designers and experts than ever before.
You have until 12 March to get your entries in. Browse all of the categories and find out how to enter.
- Design disciplines in this article
- Industries in this article
