Winning an award can be meaningful recognition for a creative team, but choosing which competitions to enter can be surprisingly overwhelming and costly.
There are hundreds of awards programs covering design, advertising, technology, websites, branding, video and interactive experiences. Some are highly specialized. Others accept a much broader range of work.
If you are deciding where to submit a project, start by asking a simple question:
What do you want the award to recognize?
That answer can help narrow the field considerably.
Start With the Work
The first step is to understand what makes your project distinctive.
Is it primarily a website? An exceptional user experience? An innovative technical solution? A campaign? A mobile application? A piece of interactive media?
The strongest competition for your project is one where the category and judging criteria allow those strengths to be evaluated appropriately.
For example, an innovative e-commerce experience may deserve to be evaluated differently from a motion graphics project. A highly technical interactive installation may not fit naturally into a competition focused primarily on traditional website design.
Look for competitions with categories that reflect the actual nature of your work.
Look Beyond Visual Design
A beautiful interface can make an immediate impression, but digital projects succeed for many reasons.
A strong website might have exceptional information architecture and usability. A campaign might communicate an unusually effective message. An interactive experience might solve a complicated technical problem in an elegant way.
When comparing competitions, look at what the judges are actually being asked to evaluate.
At the Horizon Interactive Awards, judging considers UX and design, creativity, technical execution, message and effectiveness. Each area represents 20 percent of the judging criteria.
That approach reflects an important reality of digital work: visual design is only one part of a successful experience.
Consider Who Is Doing the Judging
Look for competitions that provide information about their judges and explain how entries are evaluated.
Industry professionals bring experience and technical knowledge. At the same time, digital experiences are ultimately created for people who use them, not just other designers.
Horizon uses a volunteer judging panel drawn from the interactive media and related industries. The competition also accepts end users and non-designers as judges, providing an additional perspective beyond the creative industry itself.
Consider the Competition's History
An award becomes more meaningful when there is a history behind it.
Look for:
- Previous winners
- Archived competitions
- Published judging information
- A consistent competition history
- Recognition across multiple years
- Evidence of participation from different markets
A well-developed winners archive can also help you understand whether the competition recognizes the kind of work your team produces.
The Horizon Interactive Awards maintains an archive spanning many years of winners across websites, interactive experiences, advertising, video, email and mobile applications.
Look at the Winners
Before entering, spend some time looking through previous winners.
Ask yourself:
Does this look like the kind of work we want to be recognized alongside?
Look at the quality, variety and type of organizations represented.
If you are an agency, pay particular attention to whether the competition recognizes agencies and developers in addition to individual projects.
Horizon provides Best Agency, Best Agency Runner-Up and Distinguished Agency recognition in addition to project-level awards.
Think About Your Audience
An award can serve several purposes. It can recognize the people who created the work. It can provide credibility when presenting to prospective clients. It can strengthen an agency's portfolio. It can give an internal team something to celebrate.
Think about who will see the recognition. If your primary audience is prospective agency clients, for example, an award that recognizes the quality and effectiveness of your digital work may be particularly useful. If you are an individual designer building a portfolio, you may place greater emphasis on competitions that showcase individual projects and creative achievement.
A Simple Checklist
Before entering a digital design competition, ask:
Does the category fit?
Does the judging process make sense for the project?
Does the competition have an established history?
Do the previous winners represent the quality of work we want to be associated with?
Does the competition recognize our type of organization or team?
Will the recognition matter to our clients, audience or employees?
If the answer is yes across the board, you may have found the right competition.
The Horizon Interactive Awards was founded in 2001 and has spent 25 years recognizing digital and interactive work from designers, developers, agencies and organizations around the world.
If you are considering entering, start by exploring previous Horizon winners. It is one of the best ways to determine whether the competition is a good fit for your work.