Salazar 2007 Student Award Winners Announced To Sold Out Audience
The GDC BC Chapter would first like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to all of the volunteers that worked so hard to make the student Salazar Awards one of the most successful ever! A special thanks also goes out to our sponsors. To Metropolitan Fine Printers, the primary sponsor of the Salazar Awards, your support and investment in design education & students across BC is not only immensely valuable to the GDC, but helps to support the entire communication arts industry. To all of our supporting sponsors of the Salazar Awards - Adobe, ECIAD, Hemlock Printers, Sophia Books, Trainstation, AJ Print Graphics, Langara College, DPI and Generation Printing – your support of the Salazar Awards was instrumental in making this one of the most successful events of its kind to date. Our thanks also to the superb judging panel for the awards show! The judging panel was made up from some of the top design and communications talent in BC with Ray Hrynkow (Herrainco Skipp Herrainco) / Pamela Lee (Samata Mason) / Yves Rouselle (Bau Wow) / Juan Madrigal (MEC) / Matthew Clark (Suplot Creative). And of course, thank you to Ian Grais, for his inspirational presentation.
The awards show, hosted at Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design on June 14th, saw a standing-room-only attendance of well over 200 industry professionals, students and educators. Since 1956 the GDC has been dedicated to improving graphic design standards and practice, in the workplace and in schools, and the importance of nurturing design professionals and attracting young talent to the industry cannot be over-emphasized. This is the primary reason for events such as Salazar Awards. The Salazar Student Design Awards encourage and support students in taking their design education to a level that will better prepare them for professional practice.
As with every year, we were flooded with many high quality submissions, though this year was a special one with more submissions than ever before. And there was some special work indeed. There has been some heated debate recently about the state of the design education system. Many argue it is in crisis with shorter, intense programs not producing well-rounded graphic designers that can set type. Others point to the digital design grads and call foul, with amazing work coming from entire programs taught in the span that some of us were hand drawing typeforms and not allowed to use computers to aid our designs.
The event prompted a superb showing of student work from design schools across the province with almost 140 entries and 20 finalists in three separate categories – Interactive, Print, and Advertising Design. At one point in the proceedings, an impressive list of previous winners was displayed. The list consisted of well-known local designers who started their careers with a Salazar award, including the likes of Jim Skipp (Herrainco-Skipp), 1988, Capilano College, Kiky Kambylis (Letterbox), 1989, Emily Carr, Sean Carter (Hangar 18), 1990, Langara Campus, VCC, Nancy Wu (Rethink), 1991, Capilano College, Oliver Oike (ManLab), 2000, Emily Carr and Don Williams (Free Agency), 2002, Emily Carr.
For the 2007 Salazar Awards, the following are the finalists chosen for each category:
Interactive Design
Carlos Guimaraes, VFS (Category Winner)
Jeff Greenberg & Eric Wada, VFS
Jeff Kwok, ECIAD
Stefan Belavy, VFS
Ryan Uhrich & Marcos Ceravolo, VFS
Print Design
Ross Milne, ECIAD (Category Winner)
Chelsea McKenzie, Kwantlen University
Megan Brooks, Capilano College
Kim Ridgewell, Capilano College
Penelope Tse, Capilano College
Ashley Hostasek, Capilano College
Ryan Mah, ECIAD
Abi Huynh & Ross Milne, ECIAD
Terry Chau, Capilano College
Advertising Design
Eric Arnold, Langara College (Category Winner)
Megan Seely, Capilano College
Ross Milne, ECIAD
Megan Brooks, Capilano College
Marty Chow, Langara College
Eric Arnold, Langara College
The featured guest speaker was Ian Grais, partner and creative director of Rethink Communications – one of the prime reasons we had a record turnout I’m thinking. Ian’s presentation, entitled “Ten Things That Haven’t Changed in an Ever Changing World of Communications” was a refined version of the presentation that floored the audience at Design Thinkers 2006 in Toronto. For my part, all I can say is that I was blown away inspired. I couldn’t decide whether I wanted him to keep speaking forever or shut up so I could go fold his communications philosophy into my own. His ideas were beautifully illustrated by sample after sample of brilliant work from Rethink – this man seriously practices what he preaches. The work was superb and some of it was hysterically funny. For some reason, I now get vaguely aroused every time I walk by Science World.
I know that most people know well the meaning behind the title of the Salazar Awards, but for those of you who don’t, a quick recap. Enrique Salazar (pictured below) was a founding member of the BC chapter of the GDC back in the 1970s and served as our National Representative. He was a dedicated and talented designer who shared his passion and knowledge of design through teaching at Capilano College as well as working in the commercial field running his own creative agency Salazar Design. Unfortunately the industry lost Enrique to cancer in 1985 and the Salazar Awards were created by GDC and founding sponsor Met Printers to continue on his passion and commitment to design and communications education.
The format for the Salazar Awards saw a change this year – which we will continue to refine. The awards were previously divided into categories based on the length of the academic design program with 2 year / 3 year / 4 year categories. But education is a supremely evolving thing as is reflected by the improved requirements for GDC Student membership. We felt this format did not serve the education industry as well as it once did. Instead, the awards were divided into three new categories – Interactive, Print, and Advertising Design. It is our hope that for next year, the categories will expand into new sub-categories of print, interactive, motion and advertising. This, of course, means having to broaden our sponsorship base for the awards to cover the extended winner categories (category winners receive a $500 cash prize for each category). We will be encouraging the design schools, particularly in BC, to start contributing student work to the Salazar Awards in the hopes that even more students will benefit not only financially, but through exposure and acknowledgment of their commitment and dedication to the craft.
If you missed this wonderful event, please take a moment to check out the photos from Salazar 2007 on our Flickr page courtesy of Steve Mynett, and watch the video of Ian Grais’ presentation on our Video.ca page (courtesy of Cameron Jantzen). If you’re looking for us online, you can always find us on Facebook.
Thank you very much indeed for everyone who participated - from sponsors, to students, to attendees. We hope to see you all again at next year’s Salazar Awards!
PS - By the way, if you hadn’t already guessed, the pattern used in the Salazar poster and website this year was the fine illustration work of our esteemed friend and GDC member Marian Bantjes. Thank you Marian.
