One Show Interactive Volume 14
Article by Martin Gibson – Twitter: @martingibson @embody3d – 14.02.2012
ISBN – 9781592534821
One Show Interactive Volume 14 by The One Club and published by Rockport reveals the best interactive advertising and new media in 2011 as judged by the premier One Club for Art and Copy, a non-profit organisation founded in 1975 to recognise and promote the design industry. The ever-growing competition sees thousand of entries from the best creatives around the world. Budgets have increased, and the general scale of projects have increased and so has the quality. The book is split up into the following judges categories: Best of Show, Judges Choice, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Interactive merit.
The thing I like about the One Show Interactive books is that you get a great sense of diversity as people approach advertising and design in so many different ways, using so many different mediums. In this book you will find posters, websites, tv campaigns, billboards, apps, games, you name it, all competing for one grand prize. The types of work can include: ecommerce, corporate image, direct marketing, self promotion and much much more. I wont spoil this title by giving you the winning entrants this is best for you to explore. Like all One Show Interactive titles it features the designer, the client and other credits that contributed to the project and for the major prizes a brief description.
WIth 295 design packed pages and 1200 colour images on show One Show Interactive fails to disappoint. But One Show needs to be careful that their recipe doesn’t become stale, because it is certainly heading and for some is already there. In this addition doesn’t even tell you anywhere whatsoever what the book is even about! No blurb, nothing on the front cover, the introduction doesn’t tell you anything; it is if the books markets is only people who actually compete in the competition. Because if you were an insider you would have absolutely no idea what the book is about, and the title “One Show Interactive” doesn’t give anything away either. This book needs some spicing up and some formality. How about some judges comments or justifications? The problem is, is that if many of these prize winners don’t have any description or justification, the audience has no contextual information to judge or appreciate the work by. Context is everything; to many Picasso’s work is highly prized but to an outsider who doesn’t understand context or as I like to think, an alien, has no way of appreciating his work without knowing his ideation and philosophy. There isn’t any criteria of how they judge the works either, and you have to have some criteria otherwise the judges are just guessing of personal preferences and that just isn’t fair to the audience and I imagine to the entrants. What about some general tips to students or to people who didn’t fair as successful as the winners, or what about doing some analysis on the work and picking up on some industry trends. Do anything and I will take it.
The real audience of this book is really the people in industry. These creatives can find great value from this book for research and trends. This book has fantastic inspiration with beautiful designs, but this book needs to frame this competition better, because it is a good competition and needs to be presented in this way. This book shouldn’t be a class project compilation but rather like entering a museum or the judging of the Nobel Prize. For people in the know this book is a 4 and for everyone else it is a 2, so I am averaging it out to give it a fair 3.
[rating:3]
