AGDA Poster Annual exhibition launch

19th July, 2009

The AGDA Poster Annual exhibition was officially launched on Thursday 16 July, 6:30pm at No Vacancy gallery, Melbourne. The 30 jury-selected finalists work is on display, along with a projected gallery of all entrants work. If you've not already dropped in for a viewing we recommend you do so. Take a friend. Take a client. Start talking. The exhibition's open until July 30.

What next?

One of the aims of the Poster Annual was to spark some debate about the role of Graphic Design in changing or influencing public perception. Can we motivate and educate? Have we engaged audiences outside of our own industry - is the message relevant? Can we expect a humble to poster to achieve these lofty aims? To start the conversation and continue this level of review can only be a good thing. In the coming weeks, as we update the Poster Annual site with reviews, images and perhaps even a survey, we'd like to get an idea of how you felt about it and what it can be in the future.

Judging process

It's a tough ask to narrow down 30 entries from such a diverse range of entries. The jury panel couldn't debate style, they could only really debate how well the posters worked in answering the brief (with the caveat mentioned below) and how well the posters demonstrated excellence in their craft. Each juror had drawn up their own list of top entrants. The lists were brought together to form the final 30 and only posters with a 2-out-of-3 score made the selection. To have 3 distinct personalities select the same pieces of work for similar reasons was a good indicator that it's working well on a number of levels. However we also wanted transparency, and that's why there is the opportunity to cast a public vote on any one of the submitted entries.

Feedback and FAQs

As an exercise in generating feedback from our members and close followers the Poster Annual has been extremely interesting. If you've been following Twitter or Facebook you'd have no doubt seen some choice words on the Poster Annual, both for the quality and variety of entrants and for the processes used in coordinating it. We'd like to respond to some of those comments, and to those of people we spoke to on the night:

"How come all the entries are anonymous?"
We wanted the public vote to have a similar constraint to that of the Jury and Judges, and that was to judge the posters simply on their merit. Given that the source of the final 30 selections have come equally from long-serving industry professionals, young guns, independents and students we'd have to say this approach has worked. When public voting closes on July 30th we'll reorganise the gallery with full credits on each work.

"Why do we have to go through a registration process just to vote?"
In the interests of fairness, we needed to restrict voting capabilities for the public. All too frequently online polls can be hijacked by over-enthusiastic contributors - to get their friends over the line, or sometimes to deliberately skew results. By having each vote attached to a member or web guest account we can more accurately count votes and ensure a true representation.

"The brief was too hard"
Perhaps! It's certainly not easily answered - perhaps that's also the point, that we needed to try to get varying interpretations in order to make sense of it. The brief was adapted from the State of Design Festival's theme of 'Sampling the Future'. For those that did tackle it we had some wonderful responses. But we also recognise that complex answers cannot always be communicated via posters and that in many instances a poster's strength lays in delivering messages quickly and simply. We'll bear that in mind for the theme next year. 

"I didn't like the online gallery. It was too hard to vote"
Write to the webmaster from the contacts page. We'll only fix problems that we know about, so if something doesn't work or there's constructive feedback for us to work from we can tend to it pretty quickly. Anything we can do to make it better for the next time around we'd love to hear it.

Thanks to all those who made it happen

The AGDA Poster Annual was made possible by the hard work of our members, spearheaded by Andy Sargent and Jim Antonopoulos from AGDA Victoria. We would also like to acknowledge the support and expertise offered by Rita Siow and Adam Carpenter from AGDA National Council in coordinating the jurors and for ensuring due process for the entire event.

Huge thanks to our major sponsors for this event:-

• Spicers Paper
• Finsbury Green
• Imagebox
• Secret Vines

And, most importantly, thank you to every single contributor to the Poster Annual itself. We acknowledge the time, effort and love invested in each entry and the presence of your work once again demonstrates the energy and positivity within the Graphic Design community.