AIGA (The Professional Association for Design) does a yearly survey called AIGA 365: The Year in Design. They’ve chosen a whole series of top examples for 2008 to put into the archives, all sorted into 10 different categories. From their writeup:

AIGA’s suite of competitions is widely recognized as the most discerning statement on design excellence today, extending a legacy that began 90 years ago. By means of the competitions, AIGA creates a chronicle of outstanding design solutions, each demonstrating the process of designing, the role of the designer and the value of design.

Their 29th Annual Year in Design is online now, and I’ve sifted through the 10 categories and pulled out some of my favorite selections. And so, for your enjoyment:

Brand and Identity Systems Design: Bretenic Limited Stationary System

Here’s a piece of work from a Toronto design shop that uses good copy and comical prose to illustrate why a lawyer and specialist is good to work with. It’s well-presented and direct, and the approach of the piece matches the approach of the client, which is funny and down to earth.

Corporate Communications Design: Take Action Postcards to the Edge

There weren’t a ton of wonderful examples in here, I found, but this set of postcards about dissidents being persecuted in other countries is concise, catchy, and embodies a spirit of design slightly different than much of the NGO “design ghetto” (if such a thing exists, and from my impressions it sort of does).

Editorial Design: New York Times Magazine

These guys don’t quit. I’ve written about their extremely skilled lead designer before, and these two nominations here are making me think about a subscription. Consistently, eye-catching, and beautiful to look at, week in and week out. I missed the recent food issue, which I’m sure was full of various mouth-watering things alongside some fantastic articles.

Experience Design: Detroit Institute of Arts Interactive Installations

Although I can’t vouch for this, not having been to the museum, the idea of watching a period meal being served while you sit at a kind of virtual table, as a way of presenting silverware and other period flatware and furniture and cooking habits, is kind of awesome. Plus it’s easily the best way to answer that eternal question we’ve all grappled with: “how can I make my 18th century flatware collection relevant to contemporary youngsters?” Now you know.

Information Design: The Normandy Campaign

I wish computer technology was at this stage back when I was sent to museums on various school trips, although I remember the series of blinking lights and various switches that moved things were equally as enthralling as this interactive touch-screen map of the Normandy campaign probably is. Everything is fun when you’re a kid. Ah hell, it still is.

Motion Graphics: TV Land Refresh

This category, I’ve got to say, is lacking a touch–the nominations were fine, but not mind-blowing, and from a design standpoint I just don’t think Modest Mouse’s Dashboard video needs to win a prestigious design award. I know it’s motion graphics, but that’s a wide category, considering what I eventually chose at their best selection: this refresh of the TV Land network, which is clean, contemporary, and not annoying. For a retro network that shows nothing but old reruns, it’s great, actually. No old TVs with rabbit ears sticking out of them or bouncy retro graphics–although I’m an unabashed fan of vintage things, showing Brady Bunch reruns doesn’t mean you have to embrace the tv-in-the-60s aesthetic for your entire network.

Packaging Design: Ultrasilencer

Well I wanted Criterion’s Breathless DVD set, but the Ultrasilencer takes it. When the hell are you ever going to get a Vacuum Cleaner with modernist Helvetica styling on all its packaging? This wins my personal award for “making Jordan kind of interested in a product he wouldn’t otherwise give a crap about.” Thanks to this design I seriously started thinking that maybe this product was some kind of revolutionary thing, until I realized the object I was thinking about was a vacuum cleaner.

Promotional Design and Advertising: Planet Propaganda

The posters of Planet Propaganda, collectively, win this one. This is a massive category and it’s kind of ridiculous to choose one, especially since I just complained about ‘honorifics’ in another article, but hey, I’m not actually handing out awards here, just picking my favourites.

Typographic Design: Sculpture Today

This ‘Paper Alphabet for Sculpture Today’ is fantastic. Typography done with paper that looks beautiful. Plus the “C” looks like my cherished Commodore 64 logo.

Book Design: Underachiever’s Manifesto

While there are a ton of quality choices here, the Underachiever’s Manifesto gets my vote. It was a tossup between this and a few others (All the Sad Young Literary Men I really like), but the “mistake is the whole point” simplicity of the cover won me over.

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.

2006 saw the launch of Illustrative, a new festival/exhibition in Berlin that celebrates illustration and graphic art. Having taken place this year in Zurich between the 18th and 26th of October, it drew 35 different artists, and showcased over 400 works.

Its main thrust is described as “documenting the influence of illustration and graphic arts on other disciplines like book illustration, fashion and textile-arts, pottery, and animated movies.” The point is to trace how illustration and graphic art feature in, or are essential parts of, the many facets of ‘contemporary art’.

What this really means is you’re getting a ton of great illustration gathered all in one place. And as an excellent sideline, the exhibition hosts a Young Illustrators Award, in three separate categories that include Illustration, Book Art, and Animation.

A funny thing: even though I’m writing on design all the time, I’m still often in the dark when it comes to the genre terms “illustration” and “graphic art”. That’s fine: part of the point of their recent resurgence is the inability to pin contemporary illustration down into one, specific category, as was possible 100 years ago.

Take a look at this interview with Pascal Johanssen, one of the two Berlin-based curators of Illustrative, who outlines what “contemporary illustrative art” means to him:

It’s a new art movement. Unlike classic illustration it is a mix of influences from comic art, graffiti, fashion, advertisement, set design for computer games or animation. This form of illustrative art is marked by very different creative impulses and thus can be design or art.

He also describes the fundamental differences between what he sees as the previous generation of illustrators and today’s. I’ve never really thought about things in these terms before:

The parent generation for me is represented by illustrators like Tomi Ungerer. These have been willful, charismatic drawers. They were close to political caricatures, which was in accordance with the common operational fields of illustration back then. Today´s illustrators are mainly avant-garde regarding innovative means of design.

And finally, he’s asked in which direction illustration is moving at the moment. His answer is probably prescient, but it’s strange–I’ve been hearing a version of this answer, across several disciplines, for some time now. Read on:

Game Art will come up. This will be an art genre which will not only copy the aesthetics of computer games, like Eboy, but uses the graphical, narrative and technological means emerging from computer games and making them possible. Something new will develop in this field.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read that games are the new, growing, soon-to-be-fundamental frontier for: advertising, literature, interactive experience, socialization, social networking, and entertainment in general. No one actually knows if it’ll happen, but for the moment I see games as still, essentially, games.

Yeah, there are massive networks like World of Warcraft. There are games everyone in the world plays, like Grand Theft Auto 4. There are games like The Sims 2. But they’re still just games. There are still stores that sell only video games, all staffed by the same 5 dudes that ran them when I was 10. Or at least it seems that way.

I’ll save a further exploration of that subject for another day, but it strikes me that Johannson’s answer here is actually not overblown like many of the video-games-are-taking-over-all-media claims: the area in which games and art will strongly converge might indeed be one where the very facility of young designers with video games (and the technologial means that bring them about) could actually create an entirely new field of art, and a big one at that. Just a prediction.

One can’t miss event during the exhibiton–especially for anyone interested in vintage art or just wonderfully detailed design–was Roman Bittner’s talk on his “Ancient Cities of Tomorrow” series. These are e-boy like illustrations taken to another level and really, really captivating. Check out his studio here.

Anyway, if you were lucky enough to be wandering around Zurich in October, staring at mountains and drinking their water straight from the clean, fresh rivers, hopefully you caught up with Illustrative.

Maybe you’ve heard of rapid prototyping machines. Maybe you’ve even seen the new Discovery Channel show called Prototype This!, which makes extensive use of a 3d printer. But is it something commercially accessible to the industrial designer who wants to test out designs at home? Hardly. Look at Discovery’s writeup:

A 3-D printer: Ignore the $45,000-$73,000 price tag and ponder the possibilities. You could use this machine to print relief maps of the ocean floor, prototype products for pitch meetings, model human hearts for research or create architectural models to give construction workers a better visual picture of the design plans. And the best part — it’s all in color.

Amazing stuff, surely, but not everyone has between 45-73k to drop on one. Generally, you need access to a studio or university campus that’s got one on-site and will let you use it. But Desktop Factory is looking to change the entire game with their 125ci 3D Printer.

How are they going to do it? Mainly with the pricetag: $4,995 USD. It weighs less than 40 kilos and sits on a desk. It’s not small, but come on–a prototyping machine you can use in your house, your office, even? This is a pretty giant leap.

Desktop Factory is comparing the size of the machine to “early laser printers”, and Ponoko Blog made the same comparison recently:

When the The Apple LaserWriter first hit the mass market in 1985, the desktop publishing revolution was born. With a starting price of $6995 the unit weighed a hefty 77 lb (35kg) and was 11.5 x 18.5 x 16.2 inches the first desktop printer was not the lightweight, disposable peripheral printers have become today, in every classroom, business and home.

One of the most important segments of this new market is made up of those branding agencies who are getting into product design directly. This crossover was explored in a great article published last month on core77. It’s essential reading for anyone curious about some of the future directions in branding and advertising.

Let’s say you’re a graphic designer. Sooner than you expect, you’re probably going to be finalizing some part of a new campaign in Illustrator, printing out proofs and all the other things you do, while the designer at the desk next to you will have SolidWorks open and an entry-level 3D Printer on his desk, pumping out prototypes of that very product you’re busy advertising. Something very different is just beginning.

In related news, check out this “10 Things 3D Printers Can Do Now” from Wired.