Best Awards Annual ‘21
Seachange• Date added
• Date added
The Best Design Awards is an annual showcase of graphic, spatial, product, digital, and motion design excellence by The Designers Institute of New Zealand. Each year, the Annual is produced to document the winners, showcasing the winning work in various disciplines.
Auckland-based brand and design agency Seachange revamped the annual design, creating a striking artefact that elevates the awards, promoting and celebrating New Zealand's Best Design Awards on an international stage.
Client
Designers Institute of New Zealand
Year
2023
Creative Director
Tim Donaldson
Amanda Gaskin
Designer
George Boyd
Typefaces in Use
The limited edition book uses a bold 'edge-printing' technique, with its title printed along the edges, highlighting its form and dimensionality. By leaving the cover blank, the form and dimensionality are further emphasised. As an 'object,' the book plays with the idea of a cross-section, where each page of winning work represents a tiny slice of the whole, contributing to the final collated product, forming the word 'Best'. Each page celebrates a winning project, resulting in an over 700-page artefact. Employing a custom lay-flat binding technique, the chunky book effortlessly opens flat at each spread, allowing the reader to flip through the book and explore the work.
The Best Awards are known for their iconic use of their brand colour purple, owing to the prestigious 'Purple Pin' award presented to the top project in each design discipline. Purple is unapologetically celebrated in the annual, helping the Best Design Awards own this colour internationally. The book features an abundance of purple on the outside and carries this key accent colour throughout its entirety, making it synonymous with purple.
To introduce each new design discipline, Seachange created a series of typographic break-spreads with experimental and eclectic expressions of the word 'BEST' to allude to the multidisciplinary nature of the awards.
The book adopts an unconventional navigational system, where precedence is given to the award type over page number. This is manifested in a colour-coded system, where small, coloured circles are used in page corners to denote the award level, while page numbers are relegated to the inner spine.
While the format encouraged exploration and discovery, Seachange also developed a design system to aid the navigation and editorial experience when a specific project or section requires quick finding.
Seachange
Seachange is a brand and design agency based in Auckland, New Zealand. Driven by bold creativity, exceptional craft, and enduring partnerships, their work is thoughtful yet unexpected and often described as category-breaking.
Other works by Seachange
Related works
