Why I decided to stop entering Design Awards.

Somewhere in the middle of 2018, I decided to stop entering commercial design awards. I’ve decided to write how I came to this decision… because for me it still feels like unfinished business, firstly in a literal sense… this blog post was first drafted around the time of that decision and has been revisited each year around awards season without ever making it public (always running out of time in the run-up to entry deadlines and deciding to not publish something around the time awards results are announced as it just felt snipey).

The other reason it feels like unfinished business is because I don’t think I’ve ever fully managed to close the door on awards… When I made the decision in 2018 the intention was to take a year off, take a sense check on the whole thing and to be honest that first year of not entering felt absolutely wonderful redirecting the budget and effort to developing the studio’s own IP… though I did decide one year wasn’t enough to draw a permanent line in the ground… I felt that I didn’t need to say ‘never again’ to awards but instead put the studio’s relationship with awards on ‘indefinite hiatus’.

Four years on and I am still totally happy not entering awards, however, they do a great job each year of entering my headspace… A few well-placed email announcements and I’m down the rabbit hole of keeping tabs on deadlines, juries and winners, like stalking an ex after a bad break up. My intention was to leave the room and close the door behind me but as it turns out I can’t help but look over my shoulder to see if the party got any better.

OK, let me get the obvious chip on my shoulder out of the way… I imagine a good deal of readers may have seen the headline of this article and may have already formulated an opinion… My guess is that perhaps there’s an assumption that as someone giving up on design awards that I haven’t been successful in entering them… and a challenge to what I am about to write goes a little along the lines of ‘If you haven’t won any awards, then your opinion about them doesn’t count’.

Let me rephrase that.

If I were to voice opinions about design awards having never won any myself then perhaps my opinion would be, by and large, considered to be a little invalid. There’s a high chance someone may read this, perhaps even you, and you might simply think… ‘you should just do better work mate’.

Well, just to get it out of the way. Over the years I’ve been happy to be awarded in the Creative Review Annual, the D&AD Awards, the International Society of Typographic Designers and many moons ago nominated as a Design Week ‘Rising Star’… Fancy huh. I’ve had some small successes in awards and massive frustrations too. Though I want to put that aside and talk about awards a bit more objectively.

But that’s not possible, is it. Because design awards aren’t objective. Period. Design awards are riddled with bias around a moving target of what is considered good. Let alone what is considered ‘good’ in the form of a shared perspective. Design awards will be viewed entirely subjectively from the different vantage points of career status, location and financial position.

Why am I writing this at all? Well to be honest I’ve felt conflicted about entering design awards for a long time, much longer than 2018 when I stopped entering them. I’m going to detail the ins and outs of why I stopped entering design awards but I can’t help but wonder if I am the only one… I’m super curious if my sentiments are shared by anyone else and to be honest… all of this looking at awards through the rearview mirror is pretty exhausting. I’d love to arrive at a more definitive stance than a bloody indefinite hiatus.

Let’s get this out of the way. Why did I ever enter awards in the first place?

For several years I entered awards to meet a practical means: The purpose (for me) was to promote the studio as a business, I’d heard stories of great clients coming along from winning awards; however I always perceived this as a bit of a unicorn situation.

I did and do still believe there are a few clients that see a certain caché in winning awards for their work, or at least clients who are easily attracted to working with award-winning studios and agencies. It’s easy to imagine a client thought-process… ‘We needed the best agency to get our results… so we turned to the agency who wins awards at doing what we need to achieve’.

The main solid business reason I think why awards are a good thing to enter is to raise a studio’s profile amongst other designers. Awkward back-slapping aside raising your studio’s profile to attract talented folks to work with you is a smart decision — winning an award can be a platform to attract designers who feel a kinship with your approach. That’s true of huge agencies and that’s true of teeny tiny studios like Fieldwork Facility.

Regardless of us entering awards, I would say around 50% of our new business is from a past client’s referral… roughly 30% of our clients come from new leads seeing our work in the press. Maybe 10% of new clients have sought us out after following our creds on a past project. That brings us up to 90% so with the remainder let’s just round up by saying 9.9% of new business leads are miscellaneous — seemingly coming out of nowhere… I’ve left 0.1% on the table because once… just once, a client mentioned they saw us in an awards annual… but they figured this out after someone in our network had recommended us to them.

I have zero issues with creatives who really want to win awards for their work. On a personal level, I enter awards knowing I am not motivated by winning them. I’m competitive with myself but seldom with others. I enter because I see a business case for winning awards and honestly if I was in it for the ego then I don’t think I could take the annual bruising… I ought to say that not being motivated by winning awards does not equate to being ambivalent to winning or losing them… winning feels absolutely amazing, and not winning makes me feel like a grumpy bastard who put too much money on a gamble and lost… perhaps even worse is not getting a sausage of a nomination for work you really believe in. That cuts deep.

However, if I am honest with myself, initially there must have been more to why I entered than ‘the business case’. I don’t want to admit it to myself but I probably desired a bit of validation… especially in the early days of my career, perhaps this is because I started my studio Fieldwork Facility right out of college and worked alone a lot of the time… I’ve actually never had a job in design other than being self-employed.

In the early days of FF I took secret pleasure in being a recent graduate and outgunning established design studios … but in the latter years, before calling it quits… I just became frustrated that as an incredibly independently minded person I was effectively seeking approval from an establishment that I didn’t see myself or my company reflected in.

I wonder how many creatives and designers place emphasis on the importance of awards as a result of their education? For me the final year of my BA had a substantial space dedicated to entering student competitions (RSA, ISTD, YCN & D&AD). At my uni these briefs were entirely elective (I personally did RSA and D&AD) and they offered structure, ‘real-world’ challenges and deadlines on the run-up to degree show hand in… all good things in the run-up to joining the industry. Though the trade-off was to instil in students that awards are a currency in the design industry… A currency worthy of your time, and a currency that if won makes you more interesting. There’s something really odd about that isn’t there? That ultimately the good work isn’t the defining part of a portfolio, it’s the accolade that validates it. I do wish that I’d had a more critical outlook on awards as I was entering the industry… as I joined seeing participating in awards as a status quo.

So let’s get down to it, why did I actually stop entering design awards?

Earlier I mentioned how I take pride in being independently minded and making my own path. It’s deeply rooted in me to tick a box that says ‘other’ and find my own way of doing things. It started to weigh heavily on me that I had spent a good chunk of time and money over several years essentially asking a selection of other designers if my work bends to what they think is ‘good’.

The more I looked at awards with a critical eye I couldn’t help but see bias in different forms and scales.

Is there any bias in who wins at awards?

Fact. Awards are bloody expensive to participate in.
In the year I graduated and friends got their first jobs one started working at a reputable medium-sized design agency that each year notoriously did very well in awards. The year my friends and I graduated that agency spent more on awards than they had on the years salary of a junior designer.

I couldn’t say if the is normal in the industry but what I can say is that awards are set up to support a scale of entries that are geared towards larger agencies. Large agencies approach awards as a game of numbers… enter work into as many categories as possible and see what sticks. Large agencies don’t sweat entry fees, a good return for them isn’t to win an award… it’s to win lots of awards, a good goal for them is to be the most awarded agency, period. So large agencies will enter the same work into as many categories as eligibly possible, and they’ll do that over various award schemes for the maximum pay-off. Design Week used to publish a league table of the most awarded agencies with different awards picking up different value points in the league. Pretty groace, and invariably the biggest awards budget coming out on top.

Fieldwork Facility is a small studio. To be fair it’s a really small studio. At the moment it’s just me full time with often 1–4 freelancers at any given time. If I enter awards it’s a financial decision first of all. For a studio my size it takes around 1 week of what would be billable studio time to enter three projects into three single categories… that sounds like I’m exaggerating right? When you have a studio my size you have to be really strategic with where to spend your budget… It takes time to research all the different award schemes, to be a bit strategic in what project goes to what scheme and then choose the right categories (our work could often apply to multiple categories but our budget would never allow for this).

I don’t think there’s been a single award entry I’ve ever entered that hasn’t required rewriting the case study to suit the entry website’s formatting. More time to design the entry boards. Then there are the direct costs of the entry fee… The costs of printing entry boards (we are a tiny studio so we have to outsource this)… The material costs to mount, then safely package the entries… and then more time to deliver award entries…

If one entry fee costs a few hundred pounds you can start to see the true cost being a few thousand pounds per entry when you consider all the time and resources involved.

A week away from client work is a lot of time. So another reason I put entering awards on ice is that I know what the cost is to me both financially and time away from anything that brings money into the studio… I have to weigh this up against knowing that bigger agency who have much bigger budgets for entering the same projects across multiple categories and multiple award schemes.

Since starting our hiatus I understand the landscape has shifted towards case study videos which sound like more of a budgetary and time burden.

From what I’ve seen various awarding bodies have made big efforts to make entry fees more inclusive to smaller studios which is fantastic… but it’s still the same competition isn’t it. The expectation is that good work will rise to the top, though larger agencies will flood the same work into as many categories as they can and they will do this across as many different award schemes as they can.

Award schemes are revenue drivers for whoever organises them, that’s not a criticism… it’s true of a charitable organisation (for example D&AD) that will put profit back into its charitable enterprises, or it’s a media organisation that has made a new revenue stream out of creating an awards scheme (i.e Creative Review / Design week), this is also not a criticism; if ad sales have declined these publications need to stay afloat. And then you have awards organisations that their business is solely running an awards scheme. What all of these share is an interest to optimise their awards to maximise their own revenue. Ultimately this means attracting bigger agencies with bigger awards budgets.

I’m not pointing a finger at anything wrong here, it’s all above board, but it’s healthy to acknowledge what you are up against. It would be a misjudgement to think that a company with a micro awards budget has the equal opportunity of winning as a large agency’s awards budget. I do see the counterargument here… entries are based on excellence, not on the volume of applications. This is true, however, I would add that if you are the loudest voice in a room, and you walk from room to room carrying on being the loudest, then inevitably people will pay attention to you… whether you are talking epiphanies or talking trash.

Is there any bias in how awards are judged?

Another reason that led me to hit pause in 2018 was concerns that I had about the nature of the judging process.

To be fair since 2018 virtually all awards schemes have started to address diversity in their juries which is great, and if you work at an award scheme reading this… then please continue this important work… However, I still have this persistent worry that being asked to judge is a form of validation on the judge’s own work… and I often wonder if that reflects on what work gets nominated for an award — i.e work that the judge has an affinity with. This is a notion I’ve had for a while, it’s essentially a challenge around who decides what is ‘good’ and how a jury gets selected… A diverse selection of judges is absolutely critical to a design competition.

I’ll admit to my own bias… In the past, I have been put off entering an award by seeing the members of a categories jury. On the flip side, I have found my own studio do best at D&AD when the judges have been from a similar educational background… In the year that I had two nominations, there were two designers on the jury that had also attended the Royal College of Art.

Design and advertising can be so tribal in perspective. I guess the point of any jury is to bring together different voices of the creative community together, it’s interesting that jury members are often award-winning creatives themselves. It certainly puts a very interesting perspective on the presence of jury members who have in the previous year been highly awarded. Typically if you look at any award scheme you will find at least one jury member who is a senior team member from the it-studio or agency-of-the-moment… ‘What an honour’… ‘our opinion must count’.

Pretty much all competitions I can think of will make a judge abstain from voting on their own or their own network’s work. I have trust in that, I trust the judges honour that too, but come on it’s bloody awkward isn’t it, being asked to leave the room whilst the rest judge your work. I don’t doubt the ethics of the jurors but can see how leniency might take place. If you have skin in the game with your own entry coming up it’s not hard to imagine some judges might be generous.

On an adjacent note, and I’ve been careful to not make this the headline… I’ve heard far too many stories over the years to fully trust the judging process. I’ve been working in design for around fifteen years and I’ve just heard time and time again about confessions of bias in the judging process. Typically after a few drinks, a team will get the truth out of someone who has judged… invariably the story goes along the lines of judges favouring their peers work in the judging process… a bit of ‘I’ll vote for your agency if you vote for mine’. A particular highlight was the year a smaller award scheme’s accolades pretty much went exclusively to the jurors' companies.

I recognise that this is mostly second hand but its more a problem of the volume of stories I’ve heard over the years.

What’s next

In 2019 I redirected the awards effort into the studios own IP which was enormously gratifying. I’d do this every year if I could but in 2020 the mood was more heads down and not get caught short by the pandemic’s outfall, and truth be told in 2021 I had my hands full (literally, as I had just had twins).

For the first time in four years, I am toying seriously with entering awards again… It’s fair to say that I’m bringing a bit of baggage to the decision!

I’m still trying to gauge if enough has changed in the set-up of awards, over the last four years quite a bit has changed. Concessions for smaller studios have been introduced to entry fees, juries have become exponentially more diverse and what I also find interesting is that last year seemed to be the year where purpose and social good finally came into the picture, at D&AD at least… that awarded entries might not only be awarded for their creative execution but also for the additional value they bestowed on the communities they serve… which is of course what we’ve been aiming to do all along at Fieldwork Facility.

I still see it as a business decision. I mentioned earlier that roughly 30% of new business leads come from seeing our work in the press… well that’s a little harder to put a finger on now as the last two years the majority of our work has been either subject to NDA or multi-year projects that is only just wrapping up… after hearing a few peers change the tune about interesting leads coming out of awards entries I am open to not solely relying on getting our work in the press.

So this is me coming up for a temperature check; I’m still undecided if it’s time to break the hiatus but with entry deadlines looming I have about a week to decide. Ultimately I’ll do what I always do, go with my gut.

I’m super keen to hear from other perspectives in the design community If you have a different perspective on awards I’d love to hear in comments… these days I’d rather seek dialogue than validation ;-)