Reflections on AIGA part one

Wow, they’re spicing up the world of student design competition and adding another step by challenging students in real life scenarios. It’s funny that the emcee had made a reference to the show Project Runway, which I think was an influencing factor in the way that the AIGA had approached the 2007 student design competition. If you haven’t seen Project Runway it’s a fashion design competition hosted by Heidi Klum that challenges the best of designers to design and make clothes with certain themes or clients in mind while dealing with time and budge constraints.

So back to the matter at hand, the Command + X student design competition part one, which challenged seven students to redesign the Denver Broncos’ logo. I felt that some of the designers seem to just take elements from past logos and simply passed them off as a redesign with simple tweaks here and there. The evolutionary designs seemed to lack execution while the revolutionary designs were on point with execution and fresh ideas. These designers took the past logos into consideration to direct them in their redesign, which looked and felt fresher.

On another note I thought the judges pointed out some valid points with some of the elements in each design but I felt that they didn’t have a clear direction in their judging and felt that they were looking at the designs based on their personal tastes instead of looking at the designs objectively as clients representing the Denver Broncos franchise. I thought the “Farrah Fawcett” design that was put in the two truly showed there bias and the clear fact that they criteria when they were judging because the “Farrah Fawcett” design in my opinion lacked in execution and appeared to be an easy solution to the challenge.

Overall, I’m excited to see how each student will meet the challenges. It’s like American Idol for designers. lol


Image from: http://designconference2007.aiga.org/dc-commandx