2021 Winners' Gallery

Alex France Design

Social Distancing for Alaskans

Juried Award Level:

Gold

Client:

Locally Grown Restaurants

Creative Team:

Alex France, Senior Designer

Lana Ramos, Marketing

Laile Fairbairn, Marketing

MSI Communications

Matson Challenge Coin

Juried Award Level:

Honorable Mention

Client:

Locally Grown Restaurants

Submission Category:

Matson

Creative Team:

Bryan Cadavos

Element Agency

Stone Lantern House Website

Juried Award Level:

Silver, Best in Category

Client:

Locally Grown Restaurants

Creative Team:

Designer: Tayler Bowser

Brand Designer: Emily Tallman

Producers: Jenna Hooley, Katie Franciosi

Director: Brit Galanin

Project Brief:

Element Agency designed and developed a clean, mobile responsive website for Stone Lantern House. A luxury rental in Sitka, Alaska, Stone Lantern House offers visitors a beautiful space to unwind and connect with nature. The website design reflects the crisp openness of the house’s design, giving users a taste of what staying at this Japanese-inspired luxury rental feels like. Element’s website design services included asset creation, content development, SEO, and mobile optimization. The Stone Lantern House website guides users through an immersive visual tour of the house and activities available to guests. Where substance and style collide, this site is functional, inspiring, and user-friendly.

Yuit Communications

Calista Annual Report

Juried Award Level:

Honorable Mention, Best in Category

Client:

Calista Corporation

Creative Team:

Alec J. Wilber, Art Director

Ingrid Klinkhart, Account Executive

Project Brief:

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, a policy Congress passed that divided Alaska into 12 regions and for-profit Native corporations. The Calista region is in western Alaska and the Corporation represents about 33,000 shareholders, most of them of Yup’ik descent. Yuit Communications has been Calista’s marketing agency since 2016 and produces all of its internal and external communications content, including annual reports. For this year’s annual report, Calista leadership wanted a theme that celebrated the corporation’s business success while honoring its culture, the strength behind all of Calista’s decisions over the past five decades. For the cover, Calista President and CEO Andrew Guy and Vice President of Lands and Natural Resources Tisha Kuhns were chosen as they represent long-term leadership and the next generation. The photo conveys that Calista’s leaders may put on their corporate dress for business meetings, but their cultural values are just as important to the corporation’s success. As a nod to Calista’s history, Yuit used design elements from its original logo. The texture in the tan element is an aerial photo near Bethel, the largest village in Calista’s region, and represents the corporation’s ties to the land and traditional way of life. Calista’s leadership was extremely pleased with Yuit’s creative spark and how this annual report tied the region’s culture to Calista’s overall business success.

MSI Communications

State of Alaska Safe Travels

Juried Award Level:

Silver, Best in Category

Client:

State of Alaska

Creative Team:

Asia Bauzon

Project Brief:

When it comes to messaging around COVID-19, science comes first – but your creative should NEVER be boring. It was with this mindset, several months into the State of Alaska Department of Health and Social Services (DHSS) pandemic response, that the MSI Communications creative team was recruited to breathe new life into their communications surrounding travel regulations and best health and safety practices. Our team hunkered down with DHSS and the Alaska Department of Transportation via a series of Zoom meetings from our well-established work from home “offices” to tackle the daunting task of engaging an increasingly numb audience – and, if possible, lighten the mood in the process. Use of levity is not something for professional communicators to take lightly, but with our client’s oversight and permission we began churning out batch after batch of social copy, sign graphics, collateral pieces and whatever else was needed as the weeks went on. The Alaska Safe Travels campaign brand borrows heavily from the Ben-Day dots tradition made popular by comic book culture during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, to reach the inner child of the Boomers and Gen-X’ers that comprised a large swatch of our target demographic. This bright color palette and comic motif were paired with bite-sized, “one-thing” chunks of priority messages.

ExhibitAK

Illustrating Alaska: Artists Making Children's Books

Juried Award Level:

Gold, Best in Category

Creative Team:

Sarah Asper-Smith, ExhibitAK, Curator and Designer

Jackie Manning, Alaska State Museum, Curator of Museum Exhibitions

Aaron Elmore, Alaska State Museum, Exhibits Specialist

Project Brief:

Illustrating children’s books is a job for these Alaskan artists. It’s difficult and it’s fun. They each approach the task in different ways, with different media, but there are similarities in the steps they take. You can learn the steps and try it too. Mitch Watley, Jim Fowler, Evon Zerbetz and Caldecott winner Michaela Goade each have very unique perspectives on creating illustrations for a book. Mitch creates his sketches in pencil. Then he brings them into the computer and digitally illustrates them. Jim also begins with sketches, but he paints his illustrations in acrylic after storyboarding the images. Evon does her work in linoleum, after carving the image, she inks and prints her work by hand. Michaela sketches, paints in watercolor, and then adds digital finishing touches. Each piece is comprised of sketches, drafts and a final work that shows that iterative process. Walking into the exhibit, visitors will notice that the artwork is hung a little lower than usual. This is an exhibit that celebrates artwork for children, and although taller adults are able to easily see the pieces, we want the kids to know that this is an exhibit for them. The artwork is displayed on a paint-blob shaped plywood panel, covered by acrylic. This shows the edges of the work, the roughness of the drafts, and emphasizes the “process” theme to the exhibit. The exhibit opened at the Alaska State Museum in February of 2021 and will continue to travel around the state.

Poetica

Music Alaska

Juried Award Level:

Gold, Best in Category

Client:

Music Alaska

Creative Team:

Emily Tallman, Designer

Project Brief:

Music Alaska is a nascent organization that will eventually replace the Alaska Independent Musicians Initiative as the primary music export office of the state of Alaska. Its goal will be to facilitate growth in Alaska’s music sector and export Alaskan music nationally and internationally. Its vision is to “put Alaska on the map as a place where music comes from.” The Music Alaska team sought a logo that was memorable and uniquely Alaskan, while feeling inclusive of all the varied genres covered in the Alaska music sector: rock and folk, indigenous and punk, classical and bluegrass. The logo and branding would need to be easily adaptable for a variety of uses, from large scale convention signs to small artist lanyards. In designing the logo, I considered the features of Alaska that were most recognizable worldwide – snowy mountains, northern lights, expansive wilderness. I chose to incorporate the imagery of EQ bars as a versatile representation of music, no matter the genre or format. The final Music Alaska design brings together the snow-capped peak, the aurora borealis and audio equalizer (EQ) bars. The color palette is drawn directly from the natural colors of the aurora borealis with a green to blue color gradient. The typeface is a custom geometric sans serif based on the typeface Sofia Pro that feels both confident and distinctive, without feeling urban or stuffy. The rounded edges and use of lower case feel as windblown and weather worn as the Arctic, solid and enduring.

Corso Graphics

Rise Up and Vote | Project 270

Juried Award Level:

Silver, Best in Category

Client:

Mana Contemporary

Creative Team:

Annie Brace

Kele McComsey

Project Brief:

Mana Contemporary, a New Jersey based art organization, reached out to us at Corso Graphics to request our participation in their upcoming 'Get Out The Vote' campaign called Project 270. Project 270 was created in an effort to increase voter awareness and turnout for Millennials and Gen Z voters through the rapid dissemination of voter information in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. Corso Graphics was honored to be approached to represent Alaska as part of this effort, along with Ted Kim, another exceptional local talent in Alaska. Our collective goal for this project was to create a poster that reached a younger demographic and also hit upon an important social issue and for us that issue was climate change and the environment. Instead of focusing on the doom and gloom of this issue, we created a positive energy around it with bright and colorful imagery to celebrate the natural beauty surrounding us in the hopes that the younger generation would receive the message of 'Rise Up, it's the dawn of a new era' and they hold the key! We were very proud of the final design, message and project as as a whole.

Abi Reid

Stoked Mead

Juried Award Level:

Gold, Best in Category

Client:

Stoked Beekeeping

Creative Team:

Abi Reid, Designer & Illustrator

Project Brief:

Stoked Beekeeping's honey is truly one of a kind and is recognized throughout Alaska for its premium, raw honey. So when it was proposed to make it into a Mead, for me, the design for the label was very clear: Keep it simple but iconic. No frills, no fluff. The mead label closely resembles Stoked Beekeeping's honey jar label since it was important to show that we don't need to hide behind a flashy label to describe what was inside. Just pure wildflower honey goodness.

Alex France Design

Social Distancing for Alaskans

Juried Award Level:

Gold, BEST IN SHOW

Client:

Locally Grown Restaurants

Creative Team:

Alex France, Senior Designer

Lana Ramos, Marketing

Laile Fairbairn, Marketing

Project Brief:

How far apart is six feet? One snow plow away? Three salmon? Alaskans, here's a handy chart of what six feet social distancing looks like for us! This marketing campaign was developed for in-store usage at each of Locally Grown Restaurant's locations and quickly grew to include small collateral like social media graphics, location-branded social distance floor stickers, and postcards for guests. True to their nature of supporting their community, Locally Grown also provided live files to other local businesses and farmers markets to help promote social distancing and other mitigation efforts during the COVID-19 outbreak. True to their nature of supporting their community, Locally Grown also provided lives files to other local businesses and farmers markets to help promote social distancing and other mitigation efforts during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Anchorage Museum

Chatter Marks, Issue 03 - The State of Repair

Juried Award Level:

Gold, Best in Category

Client:

Anchorage Museum

Creative Team:

Karen Larsen, Creative Space, Graphic Designer

Amy Meissner, Curator, Author, Editor

Julie Decker, Editor, Project Director

Project Brief:

Chatter Marks is a quarterly journal of the Anchorage Museum dedicated to creative and critical thinking. Issue 03 of Chatter Marks builds upon the years-long ambitions of the Anchorage Museum’s SEED Lab, reimagining relationships with objects and lifeways by highlighting mending, fixing, and reuse. An interplay between varied size pages allows for the custom illustrations to connect threads of ideas by spanning pages and providing continuity throughout the issue – visually supporting and linking content by the contributing authors. The design of the issue and generation of illustrations share the values and processes of creating by hand presented by the authors, artists and their collective work.

Shari McHoes

Fictional LA Fashion Magazine Spread and Cover Mock-up

Juried Award Level:

Honorable Mention, Best in Category

Creative Team:

Shari Scarlett McHoes, LA Film School, Graphic Design Student

Project Brief:

This magazine spread and cover presented as a mock-up, was designed for the purpose of completing a project assigned to me during my time completing Type and Layout ll for my Graphic Design Program by LA Film School. This project was completed over the span of 2 weeks and three separate assignments to create the finished mock-up. First, using Adobe InDesign, a 2-page magazine spread was designed. The second assignment using InDesign was to create the cover. Lastly, we were to take our spread and cover and composite them into the final mock-up using Adobe Photoshop.