Be Inspired By The 2023 PRINT Award Winners
Are you considering submitting your lustrous design project to this year’s PRINT Awards? A peek at some of last year’s winners will encourage you to share your design with an eager global audience. We received outstanding submissions across our 24 award categories (and we’ve added three new ones this year, giving our design community even more ways to shine). It was hard to choose favorites, but our esteemed judges did the work of selecting the winners based on originality, innovation, longevity, and craft.
Here’s a sampling of the entries that came out on top last year. Might your work be on this list for 2024?
BEST OF SHOW went to DLR Group (USA) for the North Kansas City Early Education Center. This stunning project earned a perfect score from the jury and marked the first time in PRINT Awards history that the Best in Show honor went to an environmental design project. The North Kansas City Early Education Center—offering early childhood students, including those in the district’s special education program—is a welcoming space that meets the unique needs of young learners. The site, a former Hobby Lobby & Price Chopper, was transformed into seven learning communities reflecting nature elements like honeycombs and butterflies, with plenty of space for indoor and outdoor play and testing. In addition, DLR Group demonstrated commitment to an integrated design process by creating a storybook for students and teachers featuring the project’s environmental graphic elements.
The CITIZEN DESIGN AWARD went to Kreatives (Germany) for “All Vote No Play,” a new visual identity for a campaign to increase civic engagement among student-athletes. The movement began in June 2020 with a call from a collegiate basketball coach to use Election Day for voting, not playing. Other coaches soon joined the movement to encourage student-athletes to pursue civic engagement opportunities. The design by Kreatives responded to the client’s need for a non-partisan brand identity that would help their message stand out amidst other political initiatives and appeal to the college population and athletic communities. In true non-partisan spirit, the type doesn’t lean left or right (no italics), and the words “vote” and “play” share the space, moving back and forth in size and placement to represent their shared roles in the effort. Colors blend U.S. political parties’ traditional red and blue into neutral “Blurple” and “Reddish” shades. The visual identity has supported the continued growth of the campaign, which is gearing up to attract student-athletes toward civic engagement for the 2024 election cycle.
Top honors for BOOK COVERS/JACKETS went to Volume Inc.’s cover design for Dave Eggers’ novel The Every (USA). This compelling design (part of a multi-cover series) illustrates a vital theme of the book about the monopolistic merger of the world’s largest e-commerce site and search engine/social media company. The protagonist pursues resistance from within the organization, and the cover design employs a familiar icon – the mouse-click arrow shoppers use to select an online purchase or link – to depict the struggle.
Want more inspiration? Learn more about last year’s honorees here.
And be sure to enter the 2024 PRINT Awards. We extended our early bird rate to December 11!