We've Got the Top Dogs: The 2008 Pub Comp Winners

This article was published in Museum, July/August 2008.

For the 28th annual Publications Design Competition, AAM asked the museum community to unleash its creativity, and we received a well-groomed bunch—more than 800 entries. Our judges carefully reviewed books, magazines, newsletters, posters, invitations, marketing materials and more, assembled in 15 categories to determine the pick of the litter. For the complete list of winners, visit www.aam-us.org—and keep an eye on our website next January for information on the 2009 competition. The following is a summary of the judges’ comments and observations, including a few pointers for perfecting good design.

The judges:
Bennett DeOlazo, creative director, Studio B, Alexandria, Va.
Beth Lacey Gill, publications manager, National Aquarium in Baltimore
Susan v. Levine, art director, American Association of Museums
Judy Metro, editor in-chief, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Andrea Stevens, director of strategic communications, SITES, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Rodney Williams, president, RCW Communications Design, Alexandria, Va.

We Can Spot a Good Design
While the number of entries was down this year (general consensus was that this is the result of the economic downturn), the overall quality of museum publishing remains impressive. The competition was tougher, and good materials were eclipsed by very strong ones.

Evidence of a shaky economy was seen in a decrease in the use of five-color printing, publications of fewer pages and reduced poster size. Yet even on a tight budget, winning designers marshaled high creative standards. As judge Rodney Williams explained, strong design is achieved when a designer understands the material, then skillfully creates a grid that allows for the right balance of text, headlines, images and white space. This can be accomplished on any budget, said Williams.

The judges noted that fewer submissions took risks, instead favoring tried-and-true, straightforward layouts, making it difficult to distinguish among them. They noticed only a handful of pieces with unusual production techniques and materials.

For the first time, an annual report won the Frances Smyth-Ravenel Prize for Excellence in Publication Design (Best in Show). This year’s “Franny” went to Asiatica 2008, the annual report of the Freer Gallery of Art/Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. The judges praised the oversized layout as beautifully paced and perfectly balanced, with impeccable typography, inviting photography and a carefully chosen color palette. The designer’s confidence shows in the texture of the paper stock and the four-color process, as well as the oversized format. “The sumptuous photography, bold and elegant use of images and the restrained but often dramatic use of fonts create a visually stunning piece,” said Susan v. Levine.

This year’s first-prize exhibit catalogue, the National Gallery of Art’s Art of the American Snapshot, 1888–1978, was noted for being particularly engaging and for inviting readers into an introspective world of personal photography and its history. The beautiful design elevates amateur photography to an unimagined elegance with thoughtful details, from the eye-catching cover image of a young woman hiding her face to type selections, printing and binding.

Another exhibition catalogue and second-place winner in the greater than $750,000 category, the Rockford Art Museum’s He and She: Vallien and Hydman Vallien, is far less traditional in format. Bound accordion-fashion with two front covers, it allows for equal access to both artists’ works, yet its confident design avoided seeming gimmicky.

The first-prize winner in the less than $750,000 category went to The Way of the Artist: Reflections on Creativity and the Life, Home, Art and Collections of Richard Marquis, by the Main Art Gallery, California State University, Fullerton. This catalogue about an eccentric glass artist uses a classic design that capitalizes on the vivid color photography of the work. Levine noted that the minimal text doesn’t compete with the vibrancy of the images and allows the glass work literally to shine.

All six judges loved this year’s stand-out poster winner: the bright green snake promoting the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences’ Reptile and Amphibian Day. The museum’s designers show their talent for creating small but functional posters with big graphic impact. The judges noted the effectiveness of contrasting the green reptile with its orange eyes, combined with the sparing use of orange in the headline and the text. The remaining text is white. The poster is strikingly beautiful. Several other posters from this museum also generated considerable discussion and garnered three additional honorable mentions in the category.

Andrea Stevens noted that even for Pub Comp jurors, animals can steal the show. Just as none of the judges could resist the bright green snake (replete with a shamrock overlay), they could not pass up the New England Aquarium’s giant transit poster of penguins waiting on a bench for the Boston “T”, proclaiming: “We’ll meet you at the Aquarium.” Winner of the first prize in marketing/public relations materials in the greater than $750,000 category, the MBTA Penguin Poster is simply fun and wonderful. The concept is eye-catching, the headline direct, the photo/illustration clever and the composition successful. All of the details are in place.

Animal mania also appeared in the use of fake fur on the die-cut bear from the American Visionary Art Museum’s invitation to Home + Beast Feast, the lizard-skin-embossed paper of the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s Lizards and Snakes: Alive invitation and pop-up frogs, also from Houston, this time for its Frogs! media party. These entries grabbed our attention with their cleverness, but ultimately received awards for their excellent graphic design and strong production values.

Magazines were particularly impressive this year. One of the judges’ favorites was the first-prize winner, BAM/PFA Art and Film Notes, from the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. This oversized series features a cost-saving layout: half of the page for art, the other half, when flipped over, for film. Though just a one-color interior, its layout is well planned with a fresh use of space and clear functionality.

After a rigorous day of judging, Bennett DeOlazo remarked that it was refreshing to see an institution poke some fun at itself. The Laboratory of Art and Ideas at Belmar’s magazine, The Lab Notebook, wryly mocks itself on the cover: “’This is the most obnoxious, self-serving, pointless, faux-intellectual garbage I’ve heard in a long time.’ —Visitor Feedback.” As DeOlazzo observed, that takes guts!

The judges noticed that while many museums recognized the value of building a visual identity for an exhibit or event and applied the same strong graphic to multiple formats, there were varying degrees of success. The Westmont College Reynolds Gallery, Santa Barbara, Calif., won first prize in the less than $750,000 poster category for its striking title treatment for The Still-Life Show. The bold, two-color (red and black) design is very effective in its small-format poster and worked equally well on an invitation.

The Master Series: Steven Heller, by the Visual Arts Museum at the School of Visual Arts, New York, won first prize for marketing in the less than $750,000 category. This timeline of the history of graphic design uses the spine of design books to represent each year. Rodney Williams declared, “It should hang on the walls of every graphic design class in the world.” He and the other judges also liked the way the design concept worked as a marketing piece and catalogue.

Overall, the judges recognized that museums are producing high-quality publications, filled with beautiful images and classic and elegant designs. At the same time, they expressed the desire to see people take a few more chances, push the envelope, look for the nuance that will lift the book, magazine or catalogue out of the expected—like this year’s Franny, Asiatica 2008.