Design Museum’s Designs of the Year Shortlist Revealed

More information is slowly leaking out about the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year show - we now have the complete Graphics shortlist

As mentioned previously, Creative Review has two projects in the show, our Monograph on Daniel Mason’s print archive

And the sticker that Peter Saville created for our February 07 issue

Joining them in the exhibition will be:

Varoom Magazine (Non-Format for the Association of Illustrators)

Greta Family Typeface (Peter Bilak for Typotheque)

Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions (various designers, Candide by Chris Ware shown)

Signage for the Unrest exhibition (Jonathan Ellery at The Wapping Project)

Nassim Latin & Arabic script typeface (Titus Nemeth)

Manuela Pfrunder’s Swiss Banknote design (A curious choice as it was actually just a competition entry, and only a second prize at that. When the winners of its contest to design new banknotes were announced last February, the Swiss National Bank was at pains to point out that it wasn’t obliged to use any of them on real notes - not even the winner )

Your House (Olafur Eliasson)

The Butt Book (Jop Van Bennekom)

Kate Moss brand logo for Topshop (Peter Saville and typography by Paul Barnes)

The Grand Tour for The National Gallery (The Partners)

Helvetica: A Documentary Film (Gary Hustwit)

Museum fur Gestaltung – Zurich exhibition poster series (various, poster for This Side Up - Konstantin Grcic: Siebdruck, by Bonbon shown)

Designersblock: Illustrate (Design/art direction: Hawaii)

Identity for Performa 07, New York (APFEL<>

Over the summer the Design Museum contacted a broad range of practitioners and critics in the the fields of architecture, furniture, graphics, product, transport, fashion and interactive design (including me) to nominate “exemplary projects within contemporary design”. As far as I remember, the letter, which came from the DM director, Deyan Sudjic, placed no limit on the geographic location of nominations, we were just asked for outstanding work from 2007. These nominations then formed the basis for a shortlist of work that will be exhibited at the Museum from 13 February to 27 April, during which time an award ceremony will also take place, announcing winners in various categories as well as an overall winner (no details yet as to what those categories are or how winners will be chosen). The exhibition will occupy the entire second floor of the museum showcasing over 100 projects across the disciplines.

As previously mentioned, other work confirmed for the show includes Cartlidge Levene’s new wayfaring system for Selfridges (shown below and to be featured in the February issue of CR), Jeremy Leslie’s magCulture magazine design blog and Sao Paulo’s Clean City laws (covered in CR June 07) under which outdoor advertising was banned from the city.

It’s a strong shortlist and a quirky one. The latter is no doubt due to the selection process and the lack of an entry fee. It’ll be interesting to compare the Design Museum’s selection with the winners of D&AD, the work selected for the CR Annual and all the other design awards coming up. As for predictions of the winner, in terms of impact and ambition, Helvetica is going to be hard to beat…

via Creative Review