The Professional Webspace of Designer and Illustrator Kevin Cornell:
"Design, Art, and Lackluster Humor."
This year, at work, I've been in charge of the awards submission. What this means, is that I have to gather up all the various projects and enter them into the many meaningless awards shows about the Philadelphia Area. Now, I'm not a big fan of these shows in the first place. It's basically an opportunity for the advertising fatcats in Philly (or any town, i suppose) to get together and praise the work of friends, and dump on the work of strangers. And the percentage of people who can really appreciate online work is very slim. I went to the ADDY's two years ago. As the introductory "skit" to the Print category, the presenters came up with a clever intro, using cue cards to deliver their speech instead of speaking. The last cue card, said "FUCK THE INTERNET". The crowd roared. That pretty much sums up how little value the majority of the Philadelphian design community in puts into the web.
But I digress. Anyhow, the problem I have currently is that the Philly Gold Awards have come up with a clever little moneymaking scheme. See, instead of creating a single category that applies to, say, rich-media emails, they've created five or six categories that a project might possibly fit into. So when I want to submit a piece, I'm not sure where it goes. Maybe there's definitions of the categories? No luck. Maybe if we call, and ask what goes in what category? No luck. In fact, the answer we got is "Just to be safe, why don't you submit it to any category you think it fits in?"
Great idea! And it costs money to submit, right? And submitting a piece three times in a hit-or-miss fashion will get the awards committee MORE money, right? And if there's not enough submissions in a particular category, you'll just drop it from the show? (which happened to us at the ADDY's last year - of course, they didn't refund our submission fee). Apparently, the guy even suggested we submit to print categories. Everything we do is web!
So my respect for awards shows has fully deteriorated. Most of these competitions seem more like fundraisers than an attempt to actually recognize the skill and talent in the region.
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1. P. Dalkner
Why don't you start up you're own award show. You can call it "The Kevy's" or "The Cornell Golds". There would be no membership costs and one flat submission fee which would consist of a pile of excrement. The origin of the aforementioned dookie is open to interpretation. Then, for the actual award show, you would sit at a large dining room table high atop the stage of a large ampitheatre and ingest all of said excrement. Once all of the shit has been consumed everyone will stand up and applaud because in essence, they're all the winners.
Nah, I'm just kidding. There wouldn't be a table.