A nice A-2 Envelope for the judges to open. Personalizing your work to the audience is always professional.

The front of the manifesto, begging the judges to open it up… just begging… (image edited)

6 point condensed type! How can they not like that?

The actual print was done on a laser printer running out of toner. Oh, the quality that you just can’t show in a screen capture of the file.

So what did they think?

Here is the actual piece at The Show – with a bronze award just like this blog got last year. I guess I learned that telling a judge to drink their own urine isn’t always a bad thing. (image edited)

And for those who like reading, the inside copy from the manifesto is below:

The Award Show Manifesto as stated on the first day of October, two thousand and five.

Let it be known that the judging of awards shows for graphic design is the cause of promotion of consumerism and commercialization of what should be considered a creative industry.

No more shall work be judged by nameless faces telling us how our profession should be viewed. No more shall we be told what product to buy based on the appearance of its packaging, and wasteful use of resources.

Corporate sponsorship is not the direction we should be moving towards, and yet we judge our work based on the opinion of a few we don’t know, and if we did, don’t care about.

No more shall we care if these nameless judges think good or bad about projects they know not the results of, or care about them if they did.

Let us embrace the Government control of our industry, for it is something we have so failed at as proven by competitions such as these.

Let us remove Art classes from the school system and instead replace them with more classes in marketing. Creativity has no meaning in the world of today. We shall teach the children to think the same. We shall teach the children to be just like everyone else. Tell them what to wear, how to think, and what to eat. We need no creativity in a society based on the mass production and purchasing of consumable waste and petroleum products.

Technology shall handle itself. We shall not make the designers of the world feel they are making a difference by slapping a neat logo on a website that is fully functional with information alone. Companies should forget about distinguishing themselves in society based on monopolies and controlled by the wealthy few.

To the judges of these so-called design shows, how do you sleep at night knowing you are causing the destruction of society?

By promoting work you know nothing about over other work you know even less about, you only promote the designers themselves into positions to become the creative directors over designers without these awards. You are creating an unless loop of promotions based on whoever wins over those who never win, causing the only designers to be in the field for the length of a normal career those that you arbitrarily chose as superior based on ten seconds looking at a sheet of paper you know nothing about.

(edited) You.

Pieces produced with high budgets hold an unfair advantage over those with no budget simply because of ability to produce a more expensive varnish, die-cut or reacharound based solely on the client paying for this complete waste having a monopoly over those clients based on original thought that were driven from the market place because of societies’ obsession over monetary worth.

To truly understand the subtleties and creativity that goes into a piece, you must study both it, the purpose it was created for, the results it achieved, and the budget given for it. Judging it on a ten second preview is like a popularity contest that is rigged to always go to the high school cheerleader or her boyfriend the quarterback of the football team. The only exception of note is that for the Europeans, the popularity contest goes to the forward on the soccer team. Even Europe, who is traditionally better educated, more environmentally thinking, and based on a society of more than solid commercialism, they still have yet to figure out how not to judge these so-called design shows as anything more than a total farce.

Let it be noted that this piece was solely designed for award competitions. No judge of a competition is educated enough to figure this out without me blatently pointing it out. It is also of note that by not writing this into the title of the piece itself, no known judge will be able to figure this out on their own, as judges chosen to tell our profession what shall be deamed of note, and what shall be discarded as unoriginal and worthless of merit, only have the attention span and energy to review each piece for ten seconds while they chat amongst themselves over who’s beret is in the proper shade of black, and who got to Starbucks before the other so that they could promote commercialism and the downfall of all that was once America by spending four dollars on a (edited)ty tasting beverage that they will be (edited)ing out in ten minutes. The advice that is logical to give to these judges is to simply drink the (edited), as it has a better flavor than the garbage in the cup you are holding now.

Oh, and your work is trash too.

No more shall we judge the worth of a designers’ work on the size of a client they have worked for. Promotion of a monopoly that is based on the destruction of creative thinking and ideas is not one to be proud of.

Just to show the lack of attention all design show judges have, I shall now repeat a large section of the stated manifesto. This is done solely to fill up the page nicely, as design that was once based upon content, message and originality has now been replaced on one based on style, filling up the area of a page neatly for no reason, and simply writing a giant (edited) you on the front of a completely meaningless letter simply to enter it into these shows, completing the cycle of destruction in our profession.

Pieces produced with high budgets hold an unfair advantage over those with no budget simply because of ability to produce a more expensive varnish, die-cut or reacharound based solely on the client paying for this complete waste having a monopoly over those clients based on original thought that were driven from the market place because of societies’ obsession over monitary worth.