Hawaii’s 5-O Winners Published in AIGA’s ‘Book of Valor’
The Book of Valor opens with a manifesto from American Institute of Graphic Arts-Honolulu President Angelica Rabang: “As designers, we are a citizen army, tasked with an honorable pursuit and formidable challenge.”
It’s the never-ending battle against “clutter and empty decoration, bad typography, and wordy web copy.” In short, good design.
The Book of Valor, which commemorates the statewide biannual design competition, Hawaii’s 5-O, features the top 50 designs to come out Hawaii over the past two years.
As branding takes its ever-strengthening grip on our lives, this year’s contest, titled “Designers Unite”, took a militaristic approach to navigating through the murky waters of amateurs.
“The theme is about calling our professional design community to unite and rally. To set ourselves apart from dabblers and show Hawaii business that design is important and that there are talented professionals right here in Hawaii,” says Malia Wisch, a Hawaii’s 5-O committee member and senior designer for the brand design agency Wall-to-Wall Studios, Inc., of the World War Two-style propaganda flavor.
“Our field is changing rapidly. What used to be a predominantly print-based profession, the web and other digital media are taking over. It’s gaining greater respect than ever before and is under attack more than ever before. [...] This is both good and bad for our industry. On one hand, more people are pursuing design as a career. On the other, people with no training (or understanding of process or how design is communication) are doing work—paid or crowd-sourced—that weakens and discredits the profession,” she says.
Here are the top five designs as chosen by Joseph Duffy, design director at Duffy and Partners, Josh Kenyon, founder of Jolby & Friends, and urbanism editor Alissa Walker, the judges in this year’s competition. Each photo is provided courtesy of the winning studios.
Judge Alissa Walker wrote that she’s just happy Abstract, a Honolulu arts and culture quarterly, exists. “It is an awesome effort to produce this cultural magazine. Each issue is experimental and exploratory but they still feel related.”
Walker says of design firm Wall-to-Wall Studios’s branding for Christopher Sy’s Breadshop: “It’s the simple elements; the tape and stamped tissue paper. It’s such a simple and affordable way to make beautiful packaging out of almost nothing.”
“The use of color here is just so brilliantly executed,” writes Joseph Duffy about designer Jared Stone’s work for the Honolulu Museum of Art’s exhibition, Masterpieces of Landscape Painting from the Forbidden City. “I think the entire space is so interesting yet so understated.”
![Wall-to-Wall Studios's treatment for the Omidyar Group's Fellows program caused Alissa Walker to say, "We all gravitated to it. [...] Really, incredibly strong logo identity."](../wp-content/uploads/OmidyarFellows-1.jpg)
Wall-to-Wall Studios’s treatment for the Omidyar Group’s Fellows program caused Alissa Walker to say, “We all gravitated to it. [...] Really, incredibly strong logo identity.”
The execution in Wall-to-Wall Studios’s 2012 holiday gift is “really well-done,” writes judge Josh Kenyon. “The online greeting generator ties in with the cards nicely and makes it a complete campaign.”
View the book, designed by Scott Naauao, by clicking here. Hard copies are available at R/D, Brue Bar, and Electric Pencil for $20.
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