Daniel Howells, Blog

The Brit Design Awards at the Design Museum

Last Tuesday I went to the opening of the Brit Insurance Design Awards at the London Design Museum, where all the nominees for this year's prize were on display. YCN has been nominated for the library at 72 Rivington Street (for which I developed the website) in the Interactive category, kindly nominated by Jeremy Leslie.

It was nice to see the rainbow of books resurrected again by Anna of Jiggery Pokery (the picture above was stolen from their blog), and was a nice surprise to see it sitting close by to Will and Alex of It's Nice That's nomination for their magazine.

With a lot on display, and a very crowded exhibition space, I didn't spend as much time as I would have liked browsing the other nominations. I did spot that the late Alexander McQueen was nominated for his incredible Showstudio collaboration, which I think will make a very deserved posthumus award.

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The very brilliant Newspaper Club also received a nomination: a service founded by the Really Interesting Group/Russell Davies that allows people to make their own newspapers. Davies talked about it at length during his talk at dConstruct 2009, and his excitement at 'rediscovering' newsprint and the machinery used to create them was infectious. He showed this hypnotic clip of his newspaper - Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 - being printed on the incredible, invisible machinery used to print large runs of dailies:

The Highline - which I have banged on about on this blog before - is a dead-cert for winning the Architecture category, and I'd like to think Min-Kyu Choi's Folding Plug in the Product category should be. The array of nominees in the interactive category is generally quite unusual, perhaps since nobody yet understands what constitutes interactive design. The Kindle looks very weak compared to the iPad, and the iPlayer - while a feat of technical design - isn't the prettiest of interfaces I have seen over the past year.

Other than that, it will be interesting to see who wins each category and over-all, to succeed Shepard Fairey's Obama poster from last year.