While of course it’s possible to submit your work to the 100 Archive all year round, you’ve all waited until now because if there’s one thing graphic designers love more than a discount on Creative Cloud it’s a deadline. So here we go: you now have just under three weeks to submit your 2017 projects before the deadline of 28.02.18. Your work will be up for consideration for the showcase of 1000+ projects on the site and ultimately could be selected for the 100 Archive 2017. With more projects than ever before submitted to last year’s archive, it might be useful at this stage to recap on the submission process and criteria and give you some tips to make it easier for you to communicate your project (even if that makes it harder for our Archive Panel to whittle down to just 100 projects…)
The process
Once you have an up-to-date subscription to the site you can start submitting your work. Once submitted, your work is assessed by our Professional Panel. If three or more panel members give it a thumbs up, it moves to the showcase, meaning the project is now live on the site, visible on your own profile page as well as in our stream of projects.
After the deadline passes (in this case 28.02.18), our Archive Panel then begin their selection process. The final 100 projects are those in receipt of the most votes from the Archive Panel, with two exceptions:
— No designer or studio can have more than five pieces selected for the Archive in any given year. In cases where someone has more than five pieces selected by the archive panel, the designer/studio in question decides which five pieces will be included
— In cases where there are more selections than spaces in the Archive (for example, 20 pieces have received two votes each for the remaining 10 spaces in the Archive), the decision as to what is included is made by taking into account the nature of the work being considered (is it similar to other inclusions in the Archive?), the designer/studio responsible (have they already gotten stronger work accepted into the Archive?) and the year of the Archive (is the work of particular relevance to life/politics/culture that year?)
The 100 Archive selections will be revealed later in 2018 (we had a fancypants launch last year and another celebration is in the works for this year. Watch this space…)
The criteria
To be eligible to submit projects to the 100 Archive you must be a designer working in Ireland or an Irish designer working overseas. Work considered for the 100 Archive 2017 should have been completed between 1 January and 31 December 2017. It should have responded to a professional brief and been approved and made public by your client or commissioner (or in the case of self-initiated work, it must have been legitimately publicly distributed by you to an audience, such as clients). It should be your own work, and everyone who contributed to it (fellow designers, other collaborators, the client) should be credited accordingly and should all consent to it being submitted.
In terms of what type of work it ‘should’ be, we like to keep the criteria as broad as possible, because that’s the point of the 100 Archive. We would like to see work submitted by designers at all levels of their career and for all types of clients, big and small. All types of outputs or media you are working in as communication designers will be considered, and anything that speaks to our industry’s ever-broadening remit, as well as its established core, is welcome.
When it comes to making their selections, here’s how we brief both our panels. We stress to them that in order to promote and encourage the broadest participation and engagement with the 100 Archive they should be generous and impartial, recognising that they are arbiters of quality but also have the influence to encourage emerging designers, to promote difference and to capture diversity. We ask them to identify work that deserves attention and further consideration, and to give their votes to any work that can be described as good, interesting, different, unexpected, simple, modest, clear, well executed, culturally relevant, distinctly Irish etc etc. Above all, we trust that they will be motivated to show and promote ‘good work’ by their peers, in whatever form it comes.
What you need to submit
You need to name the project, submit up to 6 strong images of it (JPEG/PNG files, 2000 pixels on longest side and no bigger — this is a common cause of uploading issues. Name your files simply using the standard character set with no spaces) and include a video link (Vimeo or YouTube) where relevant. Another option when showing motion is to upload a .gif, also no more than 2000 pixels on its longest side. Include important credits such as who you worked with on the project and where the work was completed in order to provide as much information about how successful work is realised and produced. We encourage you to acknowledge all your collaborators and associates. These may include designers, photographers, writers, editors, developers, printers, illustrators and any other professionals who contributed to the realisation of your project submission. If your project submission makes use of the work of another designer or studio (for example the creation of a subbrand, or the online activation of an existing brand etc) please acknowledge this in the submission too. Make use of three to five relevant tags so people can find your work on the site once it’s live.
Note that a website link should only be included if the creation of the website is part of the project in question. Otherwise don’t include it, nor should you include a link to the project on your own site. This would negate the anonymity we aim for during the selection process, as would including your name or the name of your studio in your description, so avoid saying things like ‘X Client approached Y Studio when looking for a brand refresh’.
Lastly, but perhaps most importantly of all, really give some consideration to the brief description you’re required to give of the project. We’re all tired of graphic design being reduced to style, decoration, ‘pretty pictures’ or ‘window dressing’, but if you don’t really flesh out the inner workings of your project, whether that’s your conceptual approach, your collaboration with the client, the brief you were given, the challenges you had to overcome, the relevance of your work to the client and intended audience etc, then we end up with little but the images to go by and we could find ourselves in ‘window dressing’ territory after all…
So there you have it: the rough guide to submitting your work for the 2017 Archive. We cannot wait to see your work and begin to reflect on life, the universe and everything through the lens of Irish graphic design...