Best Awards finalists

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Best Awards finalists

I'm talking the "interactive media and website design" section here.
With the exception of Te Ara (yes, I would say that, but hey, I personally had nothing to do with it so I'm comfortable with that) another extremely ho hum selection of brochureware websites. And a CD-ROM - do we still do those?
I initially thought the Markitcarts Website and Cartbuilder was a joke site, do they actually sell those things? The 'cartbuilder', what you can swap out the graphic on the side and change the colour, woohoo, what incredibly rich interactivity. Anyone else find that thing utterly pointless?
All of the sites are extremely beautiful, well designed visually, but I'm left wondering, is that all the best awards should be judged on? Why have an interactive section and judge it on print paradigms?

A controversial and typically mouthy post, but theres been no discussion at this place for months now, lets hear your opinions people.

All of the sites are extremely beautiful, well designed visually, but I'm left wondering, is that all the best awards should be judged on?
Because it's that's what the BEST design awards are about!
I was explaining the way you enter the awards to someone last week, how you printout your screens, stick them on a board and send them off. Usability, accessibility and web standards don't play any part of who wins and loses, they're *design* awards.

Que complaint about the lack of quality "interactive media and website design" awards in New Zealand.

I really like alot of the designs listed, however the Te Ara sight is awesome.

As for NZ Web awards in general, they are quite a tough thing to pull off. For example absorb was initially built with a scoring system, points from 1-10 could be scored in 10 categories covering design, usability, accessibility, standards etc. However once we started to load some website into the cms we noticed it was very subjective, even for some of the easier categories, extremley time consuming (look at ADA - they are catching up but still 3-4 months behind) and the results tended to focus on the negatives which defeates the purpose of the site. The scores were also very different between reviewers. 10 reviewers (for arguments sake) could have 10 different scores, then you would have to average them out...starts to get overly complicated.

In the end we decided that whoever added a site would give it a few sentence review and leave it up to the visitors to decide if they like it or not. If it was listed in the directory that meant that it was a good design for any number of reasons.

Well, I quickly glanced over the judging panel - there didn't appear to be anyone with any web/time based expertise so......

But yeah I was a little bit disappointed (but not suprised) - sadly DINZ don't really take web design seriously. How about doing something really tricky like actually putting the URL to finalists that are publically available?

Basically Best Awards/DINZ continues to demonstrate its irrelevance to the web/new media design sector.

Why even bother with the category? Well it's basically about giving good "Design Companies" awards to dumping typically good designs onto the web, as opposed to web companies being awarded for good "web design".

And whilst we have a couple of people here responsible for a couple of NZ "design" sites, I'd like to be controversial. It seems to me with the likes of FTM, Absorb, RES72 and the like that we are fragmenting an already critically small group of people in the NZ design scene. If we really wanted to have some clout and a united voice shouldn't we consider merging the various sites into one cohesive, clear proper property?

yeah I guess thats what I was trying to point out pete, that they shouldn't be based on visuals only.
They seem to have their shit together with regards to product design (able to judge products on their function and concept as well as their aesthetic value), why not interactive?
DINZ like to trumpet the strategic involvement of designers at the conceptual stage, the fact that designers are thinkers not just pixel pushers, all that good stuff, and then their flagship awards seem to tout the opposite.
Interestingly most of the other graphic categories seem to be judged on concept as well as execution.
On the mark as to how you enter, I had to take screenshots of a project I did so they could be mounted up and sent off, I raised the question at the time, "are they actually going to go online and view it live?".
Its pretty damn sad that the obviously don't.
The very least DINZ could do is insist their judges actually view the piece on screen. Otherwise its just kind of a "who can paste up the best" competition - whilst the ability to present your work well is important, its really not what its all about surely.

Dang, you guys are worked up. But I've got *mad* respect for what you're saying about the awards. I was asked to enter by somebody that judged it in previous years, but I figured that all the things I'm good at wouldn't be noticed.

Can you really imagine any of the judges holding forth on the beauty and elegance of hand-written, semantically pure XHTML?

Or getting all sweaty about the performance of a CMS in benchmarking tests?

No Sir.

Before getting into this, I have to disclose that I've a long association with DINZ. But I still must argue strongly that these things are definitely in the realm of design! (as it seems you all agree.) After all, many technically competent developers can build a dynamic page, but only a few can do so with the finesse we typically attribute to 'designers'.

So - you ask 'why even bother with the category?' - because, it can still be made to be relevant. When web designers say that they'd like DINZ to better understand their medium, I can assure you that DINZ would wholeheartedly agree - except they don't yet know how to do this. This is mostly because none of the council comes from a multi-media background, (and at the risk of being age-ist, they have a generation gap to leap also.)

Long term, the answer lies in membership - getting young multi-media designers to join, and having them take on positions of responsibility and influence in the Institute (an example of this would be Nick Bragg's entry onto the council this year in the graphics sector...) This will help us guide the Best Awards to reflect real excellence in this field. It's our responsibility to make DINZ relevant - because it's our best chance to have a national voice at an industry and governmental level.

And before this post becomes a friggin novel, yeah, the problem still exists - who do you get to judge the dang thing, and what sort of yard-stick do they use? There are some heavy philosophical problems here to sort out (but then that could be said for any category...)

I think there is a fundamental layer between printed paste-ups and CMS benchmarks that is missing - the functionality and actual craft of the work.

As to "why bother" sentiments, I suspect that was more directed at DINZ's effort as opposed to entrants. It's not that hard to take something seriously.

Why should I join DINZ? Even simply as a designer I struggle to find enthusiasm. The awards didn't help.

I meant Sam Brodie, not Nick Bragg - (sorry about that, both Nick and Sam...)

Re; why we should join DINZ - well, I'm not a recruiting officer, so no speeches from me. It comes down to how you see yourself in terms of the industry as a whole. For some people, I suppose, DINZ doesn't provide them with enough.

For me, it's part of proving to clients that I'm credible - in the same way that we make it clear we support web standards.

Oddly enough, awards do that too.

DINZ where at one stage (a couple of years ago now) looking at adding an interactive/web media design sector. I don't know what happened to it, I even emailed Frasier Gardyne a few months ago to find out, but got no reply.

Do you all think that if a sector like that was formed withing DINZ would your criticisms of the BeST awards at least appear to be addressed? Woud you join ross?

"awards" are funny things arent they.

on one hand you're right James;

"For me, it's part of proving to clients that I'm credible - in the same way that we make it clear we support web standards."

..but on the other hand, if these people who judge are so disconnected from the medium it seems all a bit of a waste of time.

theres always room for improvement in the systems tho i guess.

Pete, I think an interactive/web media design sector could only be a good thing. That is a great idea :)

Actually, I am going overseas shortly, so won't be in a position to take an active role with DINZ. But I'm sure there would be a couple of friendly faces in Shift that would be interested.

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