Logo design is crazy, as it’s extremely simplified work that gets crammed into finely-honed, pored-over design. If there’s any area of design where a company’s CEO is going to want to cast his judgement, it’s going to be here, and the pitfalls inherent in wanting something trendy or flashy, or listening to insane amounts of buzzwords from branding experts more versed in talk than in actual design runs extremely high

So the winners of the WOLDA awards tend towards simplicity, which is great. This year, the winner is the One Degree logo from Rupert Murdoch’s initiative. It’s a simple logo with a clearly-defined concept behind it, which sorta makes it one of the best in the world for 2008. Good logo design can be notoriously hard to judge, so sometimes you have to give these a bit of time. It’s hard to know what kind of logo will be instantly memorable, even if you’re a pro at it.

I really love this one, since it highlights the foreignness of something without resorting to silly cliche. It’s great and entirely typographical, and uses just a series of accents with a slightly foreign sounding name to get it all across. Foreign hats work like accents on your head.

This winner of the “Best of Europe” is perfect. I don’t think you could ask for a better wine logo. It’s not false-prestigious, even though the name could have easily made it so. It’s just simple, clean, and beautiful.

This “Best of Belgium” logo, for a handbag company, is also fantastic. It covers the idea using what seems to be only typography at the beginning, until you realize it’s also the product itself. Great work.

La Main Gauche from France is great, even though I don’t know exactly what it is (ah, I’ve since discovered it’s an events agency), but since it means ‘the left hand’ and since a ‘good left’ involves a punching bag, I’ll accept the connection. It’s not the best one here, but it’s memorable.

This one, for the British company Education International, works extremely well too–using lines and ultra-basic basic shapes to cover the fact that it involves reading and education and well, little else. Modernist design personified. Go-post-soviet design! (it was done in Romania.)

Switzerland Alps and Arts is an example of what I like to think of as classic logo design–no puns, no tricks, no obsessive study about what the meaning of it is and all the rest, instead it’s just some alps and some lines and a simple, straightforward logo that you’d get 50 years ago from a quality agency.

And if that’s not enough and you still need more quality logo design resources, check out this invaluable site.

The National Design Museum (also known as Cooper-Hewitt) gives out some design awards every year, and since 2006 they’ve also been holding a public contest in which people on the internet are asked to both nominate and vote for the best ‘design’ of the year. 

The umbrella is pretty large on this one, so we see both the Obama logo, Al Gore’s ‘we’ Logo, and the Design Observer website (which is, of course, quite worthy of whatever award it gets).

Helvetica: The Movie is also up there, and a whole lot of other worthwhile nominees, but the one that I find the most interesting is the Design Awards are So Over t-shirt. It’s just another snarky slogan of dismissal slapped across a chest, but the writeup tries to make some amends: 

This is a real campaign created to spur discussion. Why not here, one of the most prestigious institutions dedicated to design? Are design awards good for design or just designers? Why not let the public decide?

I thought about this a bit after the nobel prizes were announced the other day, and especially after both Philip Roth and John Updike weren’t awarded anything in literature. There was a certain amount of expectation leading up to the nomination, plus a widely circulated article about how American literature isn’t very ‘relevant’ anymore, but then the awards were announced and Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio won. A few people said who?, and then we moved on.

David Kenner had a good comment about the nobel process, and I think his last paragraph is relevant to these Cooper-Hewitt design awards. We all know awards ceremonies are sort of BS, and we know “people’s choice” awards don’t generally fare much better, either. But both are mainstays in every industry, including design.

The Literature Prize is awarded by a committee selected by the Academy, founded by the Swedish King Gustav III in 1786, while the Peace Prize is awarded by a committee appointed by the Norwegian parliament. In any other context, the idiosyncratic tastes and political beliefs of these elite Scandinavians don’t exactly make headlines. Why the entire world pauses to honor the selections of an otherwise unknown group of people remains a mystery.

In the end, the Nobel Prize reveals more about society’s collective obsession with honorifics than it does about the world’s great leaders and writers.

Awards give us a framework, however arbitrary and irritating it may be, to talk about the merits of a piece of work. A group of people vote and decide “this is #1, this #2, and so on,” and then we immediately disagree and get down to clarifying our reasons why, at least for the time being. Will we always have random juries voting on the strengths of one thing or another, or will aggregators like metacritic, with their algorhithms of critical weight and coverage, eventually automate the job for us? 

Some kind of metacritic awards ceremony would be counter-productive, of course, as we can see the results build online. There’s no real surprise, and that’s probably the ultimate point–waiting and wondering whether a certain big piece of work is goign to get an award or not is almost the entire point. Whether marshalling every corner of the world’s creative class into a quest for ‘honorifics’ is a worthwhile pursuit–well, that’s another story.

Details on the Cooper-Hewitt People’s Design Award:

Every year, Cooper-Hewitt gives out design awards chosen by a jury of distinguished design gurus—but do you agree with the experts?

Now you can make your design voice heard by voting for the 2008 People’s Design Award. Whether it’s handmade or mass produced, high end or low brow, if it’s an example of good design, we want to know about it! On this site, you can browse and search for designs that have already been submitted, or nominate something new.

Cast your vote for your favorite design before 6:00 p.m. EST on October 21, 2008, and check back on this site on October 23 at 10:00 p.m. EST to see the winner announced live at the National Design Awards gala in New York City.