Outstanding illustrations in the Red Dot Award: Communication Design
The Red Dot Design Award: Communication Design offers agencies, companies and designers from all around the globe the opportunity to submit their works and projects to the competition and to put their design and creative achievements to the test. For this, a total of 17 categories is available for the participants, one of them is “Illustrations”. Whether it is on posters, in adverts, on packaging or covers – we encounter illustrations on everyday objects and they enrich our lives. They convey messages, tell stories and provide, at best, a fresh look at things. In 2017, among others, the illustrations “Hope – the modern way”, the poster series “Media Violence” as well as the cover illustrations “Lost Places” were awarded.
Illustrations for the good cause
In order to promote the charitable organisation Diakonie Deutschland and communicate its significance in a comprehensible way, the agency KMS Team designed the new visual language “Hope – the modern way”. The concise illustrations attract attention with their eye-catching style and visualise both difficult and hopeful issues. For every area in which the organisation offers help, a motif was created that treats the problems of the affected persons in a clear and catchy way without resorting to clichés.
“The illustrations of the new visual language for Diakonie Deutschland fascinate with their simple yet striking vividness. They succeed in getting to the point thanks to a basal, eye-catching style, clearly conveying to anyone what the various areas of the organisation are about. Even daunting topics are transported in a fresh and appealing manner, so that the campaign reaches its goal of a clear and unambiguous communication,” commented the jury on the project that was awarded a Red Dot: Best of the Best.
The weapons of journalists
The three-part poster series “Media Violence”, designed by the Xiamen Medical College for the Tainan Eternity Lion Club, deals with the topic of companies in the media industry forsaking the ethics of journalism for their own financial benefits. They would modify news in order to catch the attention of viewers – for example by interviewing victims with sharp questions to generate dramatic answers or embellishing their columns with salacious details. Thus, the media would no longer defend the rights of citizens but instead follow and molest specific persons to create biting issues.
In order to illustrate the message of the media being money machines and journalists as the originators of news that have declared war on the whole society, the posters depict cameras, microphones and pens as weapons. This way, a camera turns into a machine gun or a microphone head into a hand grenade. The designers thus convinced the Red Dot Jury to award the Red Dot: Best of the Best: “The visual idea of turning the tools of journalism, such as a camera, a microphone and a pen, into weapons is outstanding and has been impressively solved by this implementation in its use of strong colours and graphic wit while doing without words. The message that the media today tend to now and then abuse their power in order to profit, to generate quick attention or to generate many “likes”, is succinctly expressed in these poster illustrations.”
Reinterpretation of abandoned places
The design studio Eat, Sleep + Design designed the cover illustrations “Lost Places” for Upon You Records, which were awarded a Red Dot. According to the motto “spatial interventions”, the illustrations combine architecture and geometrical forms in order to create artistic interpretations of space. Abandoned buildings were reinterpreted with colour fields, projections and installations, resulting in high-contrast cover photos that effectively stage the old buildings and give them a new charm.
Awarded Illustrations in Berlin
The grand finale of the Red Dot Award: Communication Design 2018 takes places in Berlin on the 26 October. While the prize winners are honoured during the Red Dot Gala, the guests of the Designers’ Night have the exclusive opportunity to convince themselves of the awarded illustrations and the other creations of the international design scene since the winners exhibition “Design on Stage” can only be seen for one night during the party at the E-Werk Berlin.