New York City 2011

Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island
THE 2012 REGIONAL DESIGN ANNUAL IS NOW OPEN – ENTER NOW!
Competitions Details – Final deadline: 4/2/12.

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Pum Lefebure—one half of our New York judging team, with her husband and business partner at Design Army, Jake Lefebure—sees the effects of prolonged economic pain on the work produced in the city. “I do feel like it’s getting more conservative,” she says. Jake adds, “Large corporations that used to go crazy years ago, they just don’t do it anymore.” But tighter budgets haven’t had only an ascetic effect. Along with the ascendancy of the infographic, Pum sees a return of “very designed, technical, geeky line drawing.” That might explain why this year’s winners are a gloriously type-heavy bunch, from Henry Sene Yee’s cover for A Wall in Palestine to a Levi’s billboard by Sagmeister Inc. “There’s a lot of typography, which is something people can create on their own without collaborating,” Pum says. “That’s about budget, one hundred percent.” (Though we’d guess the Levi’s billboard, which features working cogwheels, was a notable exception.) Pum sums up the challenge to designers with her own gloss on Dieter Rams: “How can you do more with less, but better?”

Augusten Burroughs is an author who people love for his mix of irreverent humor, pathos and insight. A flashing Santa seemed to strike the right chord. I juxtaposed the image with the typical schmaltzy Christmas look by using gold ink and creating a halo effect with a white border. I chose playful script type for the author name to contrast with the unemotional title type. The author described it as simultaneously ‘mainstream and vile’—just what I was going for.
—Steve Snider, St. Martin’s Press
I can spend the whole day at the Herb Lubalin Center checking out the archives or just looking at old signage on the Lower East Side. There’s just so much to see and absorb.
—Dan Cassaro, Young Jerks
New York is the center of the world, isn’t it? It’s good and bad. The good is that you’re surrounded by the best talent—the bad is that you constantly have to measure yourself against the best.
—Françoise Mouly, The New Yorker