Brought to you by The Designers Institute of New Zealand, The Best Design Awards is an annual showcase of excellence in graphic, spatial, product, digital and motion design. Each year the Annual is produced to document the winners, but over the years the book had lost relevance. We reinvigorated the Annual by creating a striking artifact, containing a cross-section of the country’s best work.

The limited edition annual utilises a bold ‘edge-printing’ technique, whereby the book’s title is printed along the edges of the book, highlighting its form and dimensionality.  By leaving the cover blank, this idea is further emphasized. The book as ‘object’ plays with the idea of a cross-section; where each page of winning work is a tiny slice of the whole; contributing to the end collated product forming the word ‘Best’.

Each page celebrates a winning project, resulting in an artifact of over 700 pages. Employing a custom lay-flat binding technique, the chunky book effortlessly opens flat on each spread, allowing the reader to flick through the book and explore the work.

To introduce each new design discipline, we created a series of typographic break-spreads; experimental and eclectic expressions of the word ‘BEST’ to allude to the multidisciplinary nature of the awards.

For those familiar with the Best Awards, purple is the iconic colour due to the coveted top award of the ‘Purple Pin’; awarded to the top project within each design discipline. Purple is unapologetically celebrated in the annual, helping the Best Design Awards to own this colour on the international stage.

The book adopts an unconventional navigational system, where precedence is given to the award type over page number. This is manifested in a colour-coded system where small coloured circles are used in page corners denoting the award level, and page numbers relegated to the inner spine.

While exploration and discovery is encouraged due to the format, we also developed a strong design system to aid the navigation and editorial experience for when a specific project or section needs to be quickly found.

The facelift has successfully elevated the annual, truly promoting and celebrating the New Zealand Best Design Awards to an international stage. Produced in a limited edition run, the books are available to purchase here.