Takes One to Know One—9 Winning Projects and People to Know
Read Time: 10.5 minutes
Every year, an impressive and multidisciplinary group of people gather in Washington DC to preside over a jury process that identifies excellence in design—in 2020, they represent experiential graphic design, architecture, landscape architecture, graphic design, media development and branding—and these nine bring a ton of winning project know-how to the process.
Look no further than past jury rosters for proof: among the SEGD Global Design Awards jurors of the past are Massimo Vignelli, Phil Freelon, Ellen Lupton, David Vanden-Eynden, Chris Calori and Lance Wyman—just to name a few. Additionally, EGD is at its core a multi-disciplinary approach to design, so the jury will always be a representation of the breadth field, chosen for diversity of points of view across not only disciplines, but also countries and professional experience.
Get to know your current all-star design awards lineup and their exemplary projects, below.
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Jury Chair, Traci Sym is a founding principal at plus & greater than (+&>)(Portland, Ore.) and a 2020 SEGD Board Member. Prior to founding plus & greater than, she lead the experience design and media practice at Skylab Architecture and served as the Experience Design Director at Second Story Interactive Studios. She has directed the development of significant permanent exhibitions at major institutions in North America including the Natural History Museum at LA County, the Denver Botanic Garden, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Today, Sym’s recent work includes large-scale installation projects such as the Epicenter at OMS, the Soundstack at the Oregon Museum of Science.
2018 Global Design Award Finalist and 2019 Merit Award winner, lies outside of OMSI’s newly redesigned Planetarium and seeks to welcome all people into the wonder of space science. The installation is composed of five cedar wrapped vessels that protrude from the ceiling from within a skyscape of hanging aluminum forms. Two of the vessels, long and telescopic, are known as the Outies. These vessels display analog interpretations key subjects in the sky. In one, two globes, one black, one illuminated are arrayed so that a visitor can create the illusion of a solar eclipse by moving their body as they look up in the vessel. The other tells a story of light pollution by sequencing LED strips which illuminated etched stars on a series of acrylic panels.
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Darlene Van Uden is a design director at Infinite Scale (Salt Lake City, Utah). She joined as a Senior Designer in 2012 after spending several years at Two Twelve in New York. She has worked on a wide range of project types and scales, from urban wayfinding programs for the cities of Charlotte, North Carolina and Richmond, Virginia, to a comprehensive signage and donor recognition system for the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center and the Botanical Research Institute of Texas in Fort Worth, to a series of projects for the New York Mets, including the refresh of Shea Stadium and comprehensive system for their new home, Citi Field. More recently, Van Uden has worked to improve the fan experience for the Buffalo Bills and Denver Broncos in addition to one of the largest renovations in collegiate sports, the redevelopment of Kyle Field at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.
Infinite Scale created the branding and wayfinding system for Texas A&M’s redeveloped football stadium complex that opened to the public September 12, 2015. As part of a multi-year redevelopment project, Infinite Scale was tasked with the creation of a brand and wayfinding system that would equal the scale of the “Home of the 12th Man” and the intensity of the legendary Aggies fan base. The west side of the stadium is home to the Hall of Champions, a 30,000-sq.-ft. space designed to house and honor the athletic achievements and storied history of A&M’s athletic programs. Stretching the length of the football field, the soaring space features 10 interactive displays designed and developed by Infinite Scale to bring this history to life and provide Aggies and fans with a unique way to connect through great moments, stories, stats and images.
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Co-founder and Lead Designer at Design Studio H2E (Riga, Latvia) Inguna Elere is no stranger to international awards like RedDot and the SEGD Global Design Awards. Her firm’s projects took SEGD’s Best of Show in 2019 and 2016, a an Honor Award in 2019, a Merit Award in 2017 and placed as a Finalist in 2018—to name a few. Elere holds a Masters of Arts Degree in Environmental Art from the Art Academy of Latvia, where she now teaches in the Design Department. At Design Studio H2E, design strategies, concepts, interior, exposition and graphic design are her daily life, addressing projects of all scales from graphic design to object and spatial design for exhibitions and museums as well as interior design for various venues.
This multimedia exhibition is dedicated to a unique narrow-gauge railway line in Europe that is not only a place for the preservation of collective memory but is still operational today. The goal of the exhibition design was to create a virtual journey within a stationary space by means of a story about the history of the railway and its technical aspects, which would highlight the importance of local industrial heritage in the context of broader transport history. When it came to the exhibition design, the challenge was to create the impression of movement in a static space.
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Joe Lawton is managing director of Media Objectives (Chicago), but longtime SEGD Members and staff know him as “Chicago Joe.” What started as an experiment for Valerio Dewalt Train Associates in 2012, has grown to a team of more than 10 collaborating across three office locations in Chicago, San Francisco and Palo Alto. Lawton has led the team on some if its most prominent projects, including environmental branding for eBay’s offices in NYC and Seattle, the wayfinding strategy for SanDisk’s Headquarters, a donor recognition display at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Heritage Installation for NewCity, as well as the Village of Mount Prospect Downtown Wayfinding Strategy. Currently, he is working with a multi-disciplinary team to develop a new architectural and graphic brand experience for a high-rise residential building in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood. In 2019 alone, Media Objectives took two Merit Awards for two different projects—Cal Poly and YouTube Lobby.
Nestled on California’s central coast, Cal Poly’s new residential community for 1,475 first-year university students consists of seven three- to five-story residence hall buildings, and an adjacent four-level parking structure. A deep connection to place came from a partnership between the design team and the local Northern Chumash tribe, yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini, to provide direction for creating unique experiential graphics for each of the residence halls. The goal was for students to discover and build connections, ultimately increasing students’ respect for the land and its ecosystems, for each other, and for the cultural heritage of the place they call home.
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Design Director at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (San Francisco), Bosco Hernández was born and raised in Mexico City. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2002. In 2013, he received an MFA from the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, Netherlands. His work has been exhibited internationally at PS1 MoMA, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil and The International Poster and Graphic Design Festival at Chaumont. SFMOMA has been on both sides of the awards—as client, winning a Merit Award in 2017, and as a design team, placing as Finalist in 2017 and 2018.
SFMOMA: Identity and Placemaking
SFMOMA worked with SOM on refreshing the identity, placemaking and wayfinding elements for the museum, from large-scale signage to donor recognition, they shifted colors and introduced new icons. Large-scale exterior signage was added to the two main entrances not just to increase visibility of the entrances, but to provide a visual link between the faces of two architecturally distinctive buildings with entrances on different streets. Inside, the use of the color palette allows the artwork to take center stage—and visitors to get lost in the art, not the building. A monotone set of cool grays is accompanied by an accent of warm red.
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Cynthia Jones Parks is president and CEO of Jones Worley Design (Atlanta) and deeply devoted to her local design community. The firm, celebrating 30 years in 2020, has earned a national reputation in the transportation industry for outstanding work, providing strategic branding and marketing communications, wayfinding and signage design, branding and creative solutions for more than 45 transportation authorities from California to Florida. Under Parks’ leadership, Jones Worley has also been awarded high-profile projects for global-reaching, Fortune 500 corporations such as The Coca-Cola Company, Turner Entertainment, Chick-fil-A, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport—the busiest airport in the world. She recently was named a Fellow by AIGA Atlanta.
The $97 million facility—part museum, part brand experience and part of an ambitious plan to rejuvenate downtown Atlanta—opened in May 2007. The company relied on a multidisciplinary architectural, design, construction and engineering team to create a destination that is as iconic as the product it celebrates. The building is certified LEED Gold by the U.S. Green Building Council, underscoring Coke’s commitment to the environment, and, it was created by a team with 35 percent minority and women-owned business involvement.
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Partner and Designer at WSDIA | WeShouldDoItAll (Brooklyn, New York), Jonathan Jackson Kent State University with a degree in Architecture. Prior to founding WSDIA in 2004, he worked for architects Studio Archea in Italy, Archi-Tectonics and Lindy Roy in New York. He served for two years on the AIGA/NY board of directors and as visiting critic at Columbia University GSAPP, Pratt University, Rhode Island School of Design and Ecole Superieure en Visual Merchandising Design in Switzerland. Jackson’s high skill level in Interaction Design, Typography, Graphic Design, Branding and Identity, Concept Development and Experience Design underscore the studio’s name—WeShouldDoItAll.
Nike’s New York headquarters, is a panoply of design modalities from custom typographical treatments in wayfinding, to illustrative and sculptural brand manifestations that form a 147,000-square-foot, five-floor monument to brand and sport in the City. The new-construction office space is just one part of Portland, Oregon-based Nike’s larger goal to foster creativity, innovation and deep connections in cities like New York and with its consumer base. WSDIA in concert with Nike lead the branding, placemaking and wayfinding efforts within the space.
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Chad Hutson is co-founder and CEO of Leviathan (Chicago) and a 2020 SEGD Board Member. Hutson previously co-founded digital creative agency eatdrink in 2002, which merged with Leviathan in 2012. His prior experience includes highly productive stints with experiential marketing firm MC2 as an entertainment and technology project manager, and with leading Hollywood post-production sound company Soundelux as operations manager. Leviathan is a specialized creative agency working at the nexus of design, digital media and interaction that brings narrative content and emerging technologies into physical environments. Recognized by top-tier publications like Communication Arts, Fast Company, Forbes and Wired, they’ve also brought home two recent SEGD Global Design Awards.
Commissioned by Riverside and curated by Creative Director Yuge Zhou, 150 Media Stream spans the lobby of 150 North Riverside Plaza, a shimmering cantilevered glass tower alongside the Chicago River. Creative agency Leviathan was brought on to engineer and integrate the content delivery system. Along with Digital Kitchen, the team brought the project from concept to vibrant completion. The design features 89 vertical video elements, dubbed “blades” and varying in height and width, each covered in tight-pitch LED.
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Nadia Tran is a graphic designer at CORE Design Studio (Houston, Texas) but in 2019, she was a student winner in the SEGD Global Design Awards. Now pursuing her Master of Science in Technology Project Management,Tran previously earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the University of Houston Graphic Design program. She has previously worked with Adcetera—an advertising and strategic marketing agency prior to joining CORE Design Studio. Her team won an Honor Award in 2019 for Meeting Points on Buffalo Bayou.
Encounter: Meeting Points on Buffalo Bayou
“Encounter: Meeting Points on Buffalo Bayou” is a series of temporary interactive site-based installations at six distinct sites along the East Sector of Buffalo Bayou aimed to express the history, economy, resilience, culture and community values of the communities as they relate to the bayou and green spaces. Student teams presented proposals for each site based on research focused on Buffalo Bayou in relation to the surrounding neighborhoods and its interconnection to ecology and industry as it ties Houston to the Gulf of Mexico. The proposals were presented in a series of town halls and an exhibit to the public that invited feedback.
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