22 5 / 2012
The Power of Propaganda
Propaganda serves to rally people to action, take up arms and fight, vote for someone or something, make a change socially or politically – propaganda is a relevant and effective tools used everyday by government and private industry.
Do you believe smoking is bad for you? You can probably thank years of targeted propaganda for that. Unless you’re one of the few people that base all their decisions on fact and science, you probably feel a certain way towards smoking because of an anti-smoking campaign. Maybe everyone around you hates smoking too and that help, but it wasn’t always that way. 50 years ago smoking was regarded as healthy, mostly do to propaganda. These campaigns can shape the way society views issues and makes decisions. Recall the anti-smoking poster still in use today, “Mind if I smoke… Care if I die,” this suggests that because second hand smoke is so dangerous it’s alright to be rude to someone to prevent them from smoking around you. It uses charged language and glitzy glamorous images. The point is, this is just as much propaganda as anything we saw from the World War II era.
Propaganda is a style of communication with political intent, utilizing emotion and suggestion to sway opinion and action. While it can be misleading, it’s not always negative. When you look at the famous Hope Obama poster by Shepard Fairey from the 2008 campaign there are no facts, simply a feeling that this man will bring hope and change to America. For a more in-depth definition of propaganda visit Historians.org.
Creating dynamic and effective graphic pieces to sway someone’s emotions is key to advertising or even just getting a job in the graphic design field. An employer moved emotionally by your portfolio is more likely to remember you and call you in for an interview. So how do you harness the power of propaganda in your design? Start with the elements of propaganda.
- Target areas of sensitivity: during the height of WWII propaganda we saw lots of images playing up patriotism, manliness and family. Now a days we like our media to be a little more subtle, playing our heart strings without us really knowing it.
- Raise questions and insecurity: hone in on what people are afraid of, then imply whatever you’re trying to do will stop the impending doom.
- Play to egos: “join the army because you’re awesome and the army is awesome,” that sort of reasoning. This imagery usually features some good looking man or women who the viewer can relate to or wants to be.
- Have a clear call to action: the point of propaganda is to convince people to do what you’d like them to do. So action point should be clear, “buy war bonds,” vote for or against something, water your lawn less in the summer.
Now that we have a clear frame work for what propaganda is it’s time to take a look at effective propaganda design and learn from the masters.
J. Howard Miller’s “We Can Do It!” is probably one of the most iconic pieces of war time propaganda. Created in order to encourage women joining the work force. Commonly mistaken for Rosie the Riveter. According to Ed Reis, Volunteer Historian for Westinghouse, as interviewed by California Federation of Teachers Publications Director Jane Hundertmark, February 5, 2003:
“For the past 60 years, the popular image of the World War II-era female worker in the “We Can Do It” poster has evoked strength and empowerment. The American public identified the image as “Rosie the Riveter,” named for the women who were popping rivets on the West Coast, making bombers and fighters for aeronautical companies like Boeing. But history tells a different story. In 1942, the Westinghouse Corporation, in conjunction with the War Production Coordinating Committee, commissioned the poster. It was to be displayed for only two weeks in Westinghouse factories in the Midwest where women were making helmet liners. They made 13 million plastic helmet liners out of a material called Mycarta, the predecessor to Formica (which means “formerly Mycarta”). So, more aptly named, this woman is Molly the Mycarta Molder or Helen the Helmet Liner Maker.”
Despite the confusion this image is synonymous with women’s empowerment and the feminist movement. That’s some powerful imagery.
Normal Rockwell, best known for his covers of the Saturday Evening Post produced quite a large body of war time propaganda images, including the original Rosie the Riveter. His illustration style is realistic and lends its self to deep emotional responses from viewers. This Save Freedom of Worship appeals to core American values like freedom and faith.
One aspect of propaganda imagery is the power, these images aren’t subdued, not something you’d hand in a nursery. Here’s a collection of powerful propaganda images from Lava360. Like this modern propaganda piece, done in an old soviet style based on the book Animal Farm. The block letters, the bold colors with high contrast just screams power and evokes emotion, no wonder designers are drawn to the style this style for posters about everything from events to video games (although not nurseries).
With all this knowledge you’re ready to go out there and create your own powerful piece of design using these principles of propaganda. Check out Noupe.com’s propaganda design tool collection to get started with tutorials and make something memorable and emotional.
Melody Stone writes and designs for Fibers.com, a custom t-shirt company based in Sacramento, Ca. When she’s not manning her post at Fibers, likes riding her bike in dresses and high heels.
(Source: designer-daily.com)
21 5 / 2012
Five Useful Pinterest Tips For T-Shirt Promotion
What’s your Pintellegence? Are you leveraging the power of Pinterest to launch your t-shirt brand into the direct line of vision of thousands of people looking for exactly what you have to share? Well you should be and here’s how to get started.
The photo, micro-blog, social media network pinterest has blown up in recent months. Generating more inbound links than twitter in less than 25 months and reaching 2.3 billion page impressions to over 4 million unique visitors a day as of March 2012, according to Mashable.
Pinterest is proving to be a powerhouse of traffic generation and brand promotion in an age of short attention spans and click-happy photo-lovers, pinterest feeds that need to feel creative and productive without leaving the couch.
So how do independent t-shirt designers cash in on the power of Pinterest? Here are five tips for bringing your branding into the Pinterest spotlight
16 5 / 2012
New American Transit: young Americans shift away from car driven culture
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16 5 / 2012
Using Your T-shirt to Judge Craft Beer
If you’re a craft beer fan you probably know it is currently Craft Beer week. You’ve probably also longed for a t-shirt to help you adequately judge the density of craft beers, well the wait is over. Here are Fibers.com we’re constantly brainstorming ways to innovate the beer tasting experience, usually just by drinking beer; but this time I think we’ve hit a breakthrough. I introduce to you the Beer Color Guide t-shirt!
Now when you’re out tasting beers you can refer to your shirt to check the density. The colors represent SRM from 1 (being the lightest) to 40 being the darkest. According to the Beer Judge Certification Program, “In a laboratory SRM (Standard Reference Method) is determined by measuring the diminution in the intensity of a beam of blue light (430 nm) as it passes through 1 cm of beer. SRM is the logarithm of the light loss (absorption) multiplied by 12.7.” Ooooo, science!
Here’s how to use your Beer Color Guide T-shirt:
- Use a glass or hard plastic cup with a path or 5 cm, if you can’t find such a chalice pour beer 5 cm deep and look at it from the top down (we’re going for how much light passes through 5 cm of beer)
- Hold against a white background, if you order your custom Beer Color Guide T-shirt in white you can use the margins of the t-shirt as your background
- Look at the beer and hold near your shirt, looking for a match. The colors aren’t numbered on the shirt, but if you start with one and know that the top row is 1-10, second row is 11-20, you can figure it out pretty easily. You probably won’t find an exact match, so go for the closest lightness/darkness instead of hue.
Or, you can just enjoy a beautiful craft beer t-shirt design and drink a beer because it tastes good and the t-shirt is comfy and stylish. If you need more help assessing your libation check out the Beer Judge Certification Program‘s website, all members get a free BJCP color guide.
Looking for more custom beer t-shirts to celebrate Craft Beer week in? Browse our selection and customize your own t-shirt for a unique and personal flavor, just like your own batch of homebrew.
08 5 / 2012
Essential Tools for Crowdsourcing Answers to Your Questions
These days, you can ask everyone, anywhere anything, anytime.
Since the advent of the social internet, gone are the days when seeking advice required thorough investigation of forums, IRC channels, and databases. Now, we have the power to ask anyone, anywhere anything, anytime by using crowdsourcing question and answer tools. Crowdsourcing Q&A tools have been around since at least 1999; however, as the socially collaborative internet has evolved, crowdsourcing Q&A sites have become increasingly popular and useful as both new and existing tools have begun granulating into serving specific information niches – in other words, you are going to get more answers from more people who are specifically interested in what you’re trying to find out.
If you’ve thought about using crowdsourcing Q&A tools, don’t hesitate! These tools are powerful communication channels that allow you to use the collective brainpower of people from all different walks life, providing you unique & unexpected insight into your most pressing issues. This guide to crowdsourcing Q&A tools will help you decide which platform will best suit your needs and interests, while connecting you to the right audience for your questions (or answers!)
All Our Ideas
All Our Ideas is a crowdsourcing tool that you can implement as a standalone website to get collaborate feedback, answers to questions, and suggestions from users. All Our Ideas is a beautiful and simple tool (akin to the heavily marketed “Face/Off” web app, from Spigit) that enables groups to collect and prioritize ideas from the bottom up.
All Our Ideas format is elegantly simple and very effective – your question is posted above two ideas going head to head for priorization. This allows users to quickly choose which ideas are most useful. Users can also add their own ideas. The only drawback to All Our Ideas is that it doesn’t have a community that supports it – it’s meant to be used as a tool for polling your existing contacts and collaborators as opposed to presenting your questions and ideas to a large userbase.
Quora
Quora is a crowdsourcing tool to answer your questions. When you post a question to Quora, it creates a page that allows anyone to answer and discuss your question. Due to Quora’s quick growth, many questions have already been asked and answered by people with first hand experience.
Whether you’re a technologist, designer, doctor, economist, screen writer, police officer, or any other profession, Quora aims to be the easiest place for you to connect people to your questions and topics. Quora also offers a feature called “Boards,” which allow you to post anything you would like to share or glean answers about in one central repository. You can follow people’s boards, and add people as contributors to your own boards for collaborative projects.
Stack Exchange
Stack Exchange is an amalgamation of 85 technical and professional crowdsourcing question and answer sites. Stack Exchange differs from most crowdsourced Q&A sites becuase it is a network of individual communities edicated to serving experts in each field as opposed to an open forum. Stack Exchange has grown at a rapid pace since its launch.
Stack Exchange focuses on ratings and rankings for questions – when a question is useful, it’s voted up against other less clean or productive questions. The more votes your question gets, the better answer you get. Stack Exchange isn’t the place for conversation, opinions, or socializing – it’s a place for clear and specifc answers to real problems that you face. Stack Exchange originated from a site called Stack Overflow, a crowdsourced community Q&A site specifically for computer programmers to be able to help each other with technical issues.
LinkedIn Answers
LinkedIn Answers is the professional network’s answer to crowdsourced question and answer exchange. LinkedIn Answers is geared toward a strictly professional crowd, including IT, tech, & business. The nice thing about LinkedIn Answers is that you know that you are dealing with professionals – or at least people who care enough about their professional appearance to have a LinekdIn account.
LinkedIn Answers is also a great way for you to connect with other professionals and gain clout among your network by engaging people with questions and answers to pertinent business, tech, or strategy problems that they face. You can make yourself known on LinkedIn very easily by participating in Answers; when you post a question, it’s posted on the Answers front page, your profile, on the LinkedIn homepage of your connections, and over email. You can also choose to ask questions privately.
Yahoo Answers
Yahoo Answers has been the defacto crowdsourcing tool for average internet users to ask or answer just about any kind of question. While useful, Yahoo answers is clouded with millions of questions and answers on many subjects – and there definitely isn’t the air of professionalism or quality to the answers (or the questions) that you find on other crowdsourcing Q&A sites.
Yahoo Answers has been the butt of many an internet joke as well, due to users posting unbelievable (but probably real) questions, like the one above this sentence.
FormSpring
FormSpring is a social network for asking and answering questions. You can easily follow other users & brands, and ask and answer questions from them. Formspring is geared toward a more mass audience, as opposed to a more niche, professional tool like Quora. With Formspring, you’re much more likely to find “fun” or “entertaining” questions, as well as certain brands and “celebrity” users that people follow.
Formspring also allows you to post what you would like to be asked about – for example, you could say that you wanted to answer questions about crowdsourcing tools for answering questions. Overall, Formspring is a great way to ask general, lifestyle, and entertainment questions to people who use the site, or use the service as a platform to launch questions for your friends on Facebook or Twitter. In the end, Formspring is a neat tool to ask people questions – just don’t expect to get very professional answers.
ChaCha
ChaCha is a very interesting crowdsourcing platform for answering questions – ChaCha is mainly run by advertisers and marketers, which positions ChaCha as a place to connect with brands. However, what makes ChaCha even more interesting is that ChaCha allows the average user to become a “ChaCha Guide,” a paid contractor who gets small sums of money for answering questions. While ChaCha is a great tool to get just about any question answered by a real person (some of the answers are automatically generated – for those that aren’t, that’s when a guide will get your question and respond to you). There is a heavy bias as to what kind of questions get asked on ChaCha, due to their user base (hint: young or bored) – take a look at the top ChaCha questions for the month:
In the end, ChaCha is a very unique service that allows you to quickly find answers to questions, and connect with real people who can help you find answers if the web service is unable to. ChaCha is chock-full of marketers and advertisers – but again, that is the part of the nature of ChaCha – to connect people’s questions to brands.
AnswerBag
AnswerBag is a crowdsourcing site for answering and asking questions that prides itself on neutrality. The cool blue theme of the site and unobtrusive buttons and content lend for a very direct, quick question asking and answering experience across a wide range of topics. Answerbag sits right in the middle of other services like Formspring (entertainment) and Quora (professional / technical). Simplicity is the key to AnswerBag – and it works.
Answerbag provides a great online community to crowdsource answers to your questions, as well as give you an opportunity to answer questions. One of the best things about answer crowdsourcing is that it provides you a direct engagement channel to anyone who answers your questions, or to anyone whos questions you answer – asking and answering questions is actually a great way to promote your brand by being honest and engaging with online communities.
Answers.com
Answers.com isn’t just a tool for crowdsourcing answers, although it accomplishes that very well – it’s also a platform that retrieves answers to your questions from a vast repository of hundreds of respected and trusted editorial reference books. Answers.com is broken down into several sections: Answers.com, the main site, is for asking and answering questions. WikiAnswers is for specific, unique, complex, or social questions, and aims to deliver to the point answers for questions instead of general discussion. ReferenceAnswers is the supply of editorial sources that Answers.com maintains – mainly for who-is or what-is factually related questions.
In addition to the wealth of community and reference resources that Answers.com provides, they also provide access to video answers. Video Answers has over 200,000 videos in 200 categories, making it easy to find instructional and informative videos about questions you have.
LockerGnome.net
LockerGnome.net is a crowdsourced community question and answer platform specific to the IT / Tech industry. Lockergnome focuses on commenting and voting to bring questions to the top – the more votes and comments, the more visible the question is. Lockergnome is moderated by its users – moderation rights are gradually assigned to members based on their “reputation.” Users gain points and authority to moderate and modify questions based on how much they participate.
Amazon Askville
Amazon Askville is a crowdsourced Q&A platform from Amazon. There isn’t anything particularly special about it, and it’s been flying under the rader since 2006. But, it’s still a full featured Q&A tool that recieves regular submissions (every minute, even.)
Recommended Reading
In addition to the wealth of crowdsourced question and answer platforms that exist by themselves, there are also Q&A tools built into existing networks like Facebook and Google+.
David Pogue (if you don’t know David, he’s the New York Times technology columnist, and also a major voice on the web regarding the state of technology) wrote a great article for Scientific American in 2010 about the advent of information crowdsourcing, highlighting services like ChaCha, Yahoo Answers, and (the now defunct) Aardvark. David provides a great perspective as to why and how people are using information crowdsourcing tools, and how to determine which tools are the best for your personal use. Although the article comes from 2010, David’s judicious analyses of the subject is still very relevant.
Wired Magazine‘s Gary Rivlin published a fantastic in-depth analyses and interview with the founders of Quora which highlights many of the issues facing the crowdsourced Q&A industry. Gary reports that many of the crowdsourced Q&A sites are facing a big issue – quality – in that so many users are signing up for Q&A services that it becomes hard to keep the good, relevant questions visible because there are too many unrelated or irrelevant questions and answers being submitted.
Conclusion
Crowdsourcing answers to your questions & answering questions from the crowd is an extremely effective way to gain insights, advice, and new strategies & techniques. Crowdsourcing answers allows you to engage with like minded individuals in your field – whether they be industry professional, business contacts, sales leads, or just the general public – and use their brainpower to your advantage. In addition to the advantages that you personally glean from having crowds answer your questions, you gain clout and recognition by providing your own expertise in answering questions.
In the end, crowdsourcing answers is a great way to connect with new minds, glean new insights, and promote yourself with your own knowledge and skills. No matter what questions you have or knowledge you want to share, there is a platform for you that will allow you to use the power of crowdsourcing to engage people of all walks of life in a highly conversational and interactive way.
07 5 / 2012
Seven Effective Editorial Illustrations
People need pictures. Block text in a magazine just isn’t engaging enough for the fast-paced lives of the modern reader. So as the attention span of Americans decreased the demand for illustrators increases. Here are some engaging and evocative editorial illustrations.
Artist: James Jean
Publication: Rolling Stone
Subject: Portrait of Trent Reznor. James Jean became most known for his beautiful Fables comic book covers. Jean describes the design processes for the illustration he did for Rolling Stone. In his blog Jean said he was given more creative license and the result is chilling. “I researched the viral marketing campaign for the album, which was based on a futuristic narrative of mass hallucinations, government conspiracies, and impending apocalypse.” 
Artist: Josh Cochran
Publication: The New Yorker
Artist: Olivier Kugler
Publication: XXI
Subject: This example of Olivier Kulger’s depiction of a truck driver’s journey across Iran won him the top prize at the V&A Illustration Awards. In this case the illustration is the editorial, as apposed to playing a supporting role to the text. The sketchbook style lends its self well to a narrative, giving the story a personal feel. 
Artist: Christoph Niemann
Publication: The New Yorker
Subject: As said before the New Yorkers covers have always been an amazing example of editorial illustration and Christoph Neimann has quite a collection under his belt. What’s amazing the New Yorker cover is you don’t get a headline to give context to the picture, they are incredible examples of the “show, don’t tell” mantra. You don’t need a headline to know the cover on the left is about taxes and that the cover on the right is about the Japanese earthquake and nuclear power crisis (unless you live under a rock). If you’re yearning for some excellent cover inspiration browse Neimann’s portfolio of New Yorker covers.
Artist: Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly
Publication: The New Yorker
Subject: 9/11/2011, a day that will go down in history. Everyone old enough to know anything at the time remembers where they were on that day. I don’t envy Spiegelman and Mouly the task of coming up with a cover in the wake of one of the greatest tragedies on American soil for the publication named for the people of the great city where it occurred. This design solution is brilliant; simple, powerful – you don’t need much to evoke great emotion and meaning.
Artist: Valero Doval
Publication: M Magazine
Subject: An illustration for a story about Blendr (Geosocial Networking Application). This illustration is colorful, fun, and looks a little like a vintage advertisement, but with the very recognizable Google map placement icon, it’s a good blend of the vintage and modern.
Artist: Nata Metlukh
Publication: American Way
Subject: This illustration, entitled Negative Comments, clearly illustrates how many people feel about people who leave mean anonymous comments on the internet. Once again, a great example of the illustration helping support a story and drawing the reader in for more.
Artist: Hattie Stewart
Publication: Lula
Subject: This mixed media illustration is a very different take on magazine covers. The mixture of illustration and photography produces a dynamic and memorable cover.
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02 5 / 2012
Top 10 Funny Anthropomorphic Food T-shirts
As a t-shirt designer I spend a lot of time browsing the web checking out the latest t-shirt trends. One thing I’ve noticed is shirts featuring funny anthropomorphic food are always popular. I could do a top ten just featuring moldy-zombie food t-shirts, although that would be zombipamorphic Food… I think. The point is, there are herds of funny shirts with food acting like people – so here’s a round of up of the best.
1. An Agreeable Artichoke t-shirt from ShirtWoot, Shirt Woot is a daily deal site, so this shirt is probably not available currently, but it’s such a cute little illustration of a friendly artichoke, how can you not smile?
2. Bacon Makes Everything Better t-shirt from Loyal Army: we could do an entire top 10 just about bacon t-shirt, but here’s a particularly cute one. This bacon knows he’s the answer to all of your problems (except obesity) and he’s willing to lay down his little life for you – look at how happy he seems just chill’n in that pan.
3. Oooooh Burn t-shirt from Snorg Tees: this toast just got burned, so snap! Would you like some ice for that? Or maybe some butter? Anthropomorphic bread is a really popular t-shirt concept, breakfast food in general is pretty popular among t-shirt designers.
4. Toaster Love t-shirt by Busted Tees: This sexy toaster wants to get it on with this piece of bread. See, it’s funny to apply human attributes to food and household appliances.
5. I Make Bread Fun t- shirt from Questionable
Content- This funny little toaster t-shirt is from webcomic artist Jeph Jacques. Technically this isn’t an anthropomorphic food t-shirt, but I felt a toaster was close enough.
6. Let’s Go Gave Breakfast t-shirt from Redbubble: Reminiscent of the anthropomorphic dancing food from old movie theaters, this has a vintage feel and celebrates the most important meal of the day – Breakfast!
7. Orange U Sick of Vampire Yet t-shirt from Delias: True Blood, Vampire Diaries, Twilight, when will this trend end? Well, these vampire oranges are cute and funny and make a great point.
8. First is the Wurst t-shirt by Busted Tees – And the winner is, the wurst! It’s funny because of the double meaning and the idea of a sausage running a race.
9. I’m Popcorn t-shirt by Goats: I never noticed how much like a little monster popcorn looks.
10. Sleeping Sushi t-shirt from Threadless: Darling little rice balls sleeping under pieces of raw fish… too cute.
Melody Stone is a marketing associate and custom t-shirt designer at Fibers.com. Melody blogs for Fibers.com regularly and loves innovative design where ever it is found.
02 5 / 2012
12 Essential Online Design Competition Directories
Editor’s note:
This is a guest contribution by Erik Hans Rasmussen who writes and designs custom t-shirts for Fibers. Erik can be faintly heard tweeting @LookRad.
We are all familiar with the challenges of receiving recognition in the highly competitive and saturated industry of art and design. Whether you are producing work for a client, for school, or for yourself, it’s a challenge to stand out from the crowd. Without recognition, we won’t be able to pursue our career as professional artists, because no one will know who we are. This is why we need to enter design competitions.
I’ve created this guide to essential design competition directories to help you carve your own path through the growing crowd of designers and artists who are all vying for attention and recognition. By targeting leading recruiters in the industry, and a large viewership to boot, design competitions are an essential channel to show your stuff and prove your talents as an artist. Since you’re already so pumped up to kick your design career into high gear, I know I don’t have to sell this idea to you. Here is a digital roadmap to the top 12 Essential Online Design Competition Directories.
Recommended Reading: 15 Young and Talented Designers
1. AIGA
AIGA, the professional association for design, hosts regular competitions celebrating exemplary design while demonstrating the power of effective design. Competitions encompass all disciplines of design, from print to digital, independent of platform. Last year, AIGA hosted the “365 | Design Effectiveness Exhibition,” which showcased the excellence of effectiveness and aesthetics in communication design. This year, AIGA is hosting the “Justified” competition, a showcase of effective design.
Apart from competitions, AIGA also hosts events, workshops, conferences and galleries on a regular basis. AIGA is an invaluable resource for any designer to keep an eye on considering that it is the oldest and largest professional membership organization for design, boasting over 22,000 members across 66 chapters in the U.S. alone.
2. Contest Watchers
Contest Watchers is a group who seeks out international contests for many creative disciplines. Contest Watchers also watches out for international scholarships and workshops. In addition to providing a wealthy database of competition opportunities, Contest Watchers also promotes upcoming artists by publishing the names of contest winners. According to their website, “Winning a contest that has been featured on Contest Watchers gives you an opportunity to reach a worldwide audience.”
Some of the past competitions on Contest Watchers include the 7th International Mobile Gaming Awards (IMGA), a yearly contest for innovation and creativity in mobile games worldwide; the 10th Annual Independent Music Awards, a prestigious international program that gets top-ranked independent artists and releases global recognition; and the Art Revolution Taipei 2012 International Art Competition, featuring hundreds of leading and emerging galleries and artists from around the globe.
I know I wouldn’t have heard of any of these competitions if it weren’t for Contest Watchers. I strongly suggest that you keep up with all the news and announcements from Contest Watchers if you are serious about gaining recognition for yourself as a creative professional.
3. Dexigner
Dexigner is a responsive design news aggregator, which also maintains a vast library of design competitions from all disciplines of creative professions. Dexigner’s competitions include entries like the Foam Talent Call, a competition for aspiring young photographers, as well as Adobe’s Youth Voice Aspire Competiton, a competition for teens who demonstrate creativity and skill in using video, print, or audio to convey their perspectives on issues important to them.
Aside from competitions, Dexigner is an incredibly rich, responsive and easy-to-read design news aggregator. In my opinion, Dexigner may possibly be the most thorough resource on the web for all design news around. By providing an highly granular directory that can also locate events and competitions near you by location, Dexigner proves itself to be a one stop destination for designers looking to stay up to date about their discipline, and to keep abreast of the hottest competitions and events.
4. Graphic Competitions
Graphic Competitions is a simple (yet still elegant) directory of visual art competitions. Graphic Competitions features competitions for graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, animators, and more. They even have a students-only competition section. In addition to providing an extensive listing of design competitions, Graphic Competitions also hosts a bookshop with tons of resources for all you artists to bury your faces in.
Graphic Competitions competitions include respectable entries, such as the World Standards Day 2012 Poster Competition, a poster design competition with the theme of “Less waste, better results – Standards increase efficiency” and the Chelten Illustration Awards 2012, a competition for illustrators focused around the theme of “Magical Objects.”
5. Designophy Calendar
Designophy is a design news & resource site that features an extensive calendar for competitions, conferences, events and fairs, and education. Designophy also offers a Designopedia, a resource list of designers, products, and terms; and a resource list of essential manuals, books, and magazines Additionally, Designophy hosts regular interviews with designers and features articles about all facets of design.
6. CommArts
CommArts (Communication Arts) is a company that knows a thing or two about the design world, given that they’ve been around since 1959. The good thing is that they like to share their knowledge with the creative masses. CommArts also publishes a physical magazine in addition to their web offerings called “Communication Arts Magazine.” CommArts regularly posts features and articles from the design world, and focuses on showcasing, profiling, and interviewing creative designers from around the world.
Communication Arts has six exclusive, juried competitions that cover the entire field of visual communications. Winning selections are published both in print and online.
Art and creative directors, graphic designers, web designers, copywriters, photographers and illustrators find these competitions a priority for worldwide promotion and a valuable resource for potential clients and colleagues. Winning the CommArts competitions earn high marks for an artist’s career. According to their website, “CA’s Award of Excellence is one of the most-coveted awards in the industry. If chosen, winning places you in the highest ranks of your profession.”
CommArts review panel consists of industry leaders and visionaries such as Saul Bass, Michael Beirut, Lee Clow, Hillman Curtis, Louise Fili, Milton Glaser, Jeff Goodby, Hal Riney, Sam Scali, Paula Scher, Michael Vanderbyl, Lynda Weinman, Fred Woodward and Jeffrey Zeldman.
7. Studio1C Blog
Studio1C is an internet marketing, SEO, and web design firm that happens to also offer a comprehensive and regularly updated list of design competitions from around the globe. Contests from Studio1C’s list include the DieLine Package Design Awards, a competition specifically for package design, and the Conqueror 2012 Typograpic Games, a competition for typographical sports posters.
Studio1C also has a short list of ongoing competitions from around the Web that you can compete in regularly, if you’re a glutton for punishment (or great success.)
8. PrintMag
Print is a bi-monthly magazine about visual culture and design, as well as a vast online resource for all things related to print design. Print was founded in 1940 (a long time ago!) and has been cited as one of the most engaging, insightful, and journalistic endeavor ever seen. Print offers a great resource section for print designers, as well as inspiration for those who crave it.
Print’s directory section gives you a chance to find design firms, schools, designers, stock images, printing services, and more. It also has a large online shop with many tools and resources for print designers.
Print’s competitions include the infamous Print Design Annual Competition, a competition for any printed materials that you can produce (currently closed), not to mention the Creativity + Commerce Competition, a competition for business-focused and print & interactive design.
9. All Art Competitions
All Art Competitions is a web directory of artistic competitions from around the world. There are many entries on All Art Competitions that I hadn’t seen listed in other directories. Another thing that you can find in here that isn’t found in most other sites is that generally the prize money or incentive is listed alongside the title of the competition.
All Art Competitions features some hard to find competitions and contests, like the $10,000 Southern Comfort Video Contest, as well as the $7,500 Dole Video Contest. Besides video, All Art Competitions also showcases creative contests for less publicized disciplines, such as sculpture, literature, poetry, architecture, dance, and music.
10. Call For
Call For is an online directory for awards, prizes, concepts, competitions, exhibitions, festivals, participations, entries, and submissions which do not require a fee from you in order to participate.
Call for has an absolutely extensive list of “calls” for just about every kind of creative professional. The site is well designed and simple, featuring a grid layout (which I really love) making it easy to scan through the tons of entries on the site at a glance. Call For is also nice enough to list where they get their calls from on their info page.
11. Design Competition
Design Competition is simply a directory for online design competitions. I’m not sure what sources they aggregate from, but the style is very simple and to the point, and there are a whole lot of entries, some of which I know I haven’t found anywhere else.
Design Competition is definitely worth a look at, considering the number of competitions they list. The other nice thing about Design Competition is their cheesy but effective countdown timer in the top right hand side of their site which tells you when the next competition deadline ends.
12. Design Boom
Design Boom is a site for designers who are looking to both learn and compete in the design world. The site has over 24,148 articles in their information repository. Design Boom also offers courses called “Design-Aerobics,” featuring topics on self promotion, temporary structure (pop up), graphic design, shopping, paper, and food. You might think these titles sound a little simplistic but take a look at the actual course materials and you’ll be surprised to find the wealth of information covered in each course about design.
Design Boom doesn’t currently have a list of ongoing competitons, although you can easily find contests and competitions by reading their articles. Design Boom does however feature a list of results from finished design competitions. I listed Design Boom here because of the quality of their site and their large readership. If you won a contest that was featured on Design Boom, you would gain a lot of exposure for yourself in a very short time.
Conclusion
There are many places for you to showcase your creative abilities. Design competitions are an essential platform for you to show the world how good you are. Yes, via the power of the internet, the whole world can potentially see your greatness if you just take the time to compete with others in your discipline. If you have the dedication and the passion it takes to succeed in your craft, you should fare well in any design competition. I sincerely hope this article will prove useful to you in your creative endeavors. Thank you for reading!
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