The Dieline Awards by, well, The Dieline– which is one of my favorite package design sites. The official ceremony will be held at the FUSE Conference, April 14th, 2010 in Chicago.

Philips is one of those companies that has a great history of design dating back to the 1920s, and once again they really cleaned up at the annual IF product design award competition winning 22 awards. One of my favorite new award-winning products is their Wake-Up Light. It is an alarm clock that slowly lights up and gradually gets brighter until the light wakes you up. There are only a few major companies who put a lot of importance on design aesthetics, and it is nice to see that Philips constantly puts out innovative work. Take a look at this year’s winners.

via Core77

San Jose will play host to the annual Tech Awards gala this Wednesday to honor 25 laureates who have benefited humanity through their work in education, equality, health, environment, and economic development. Among the nominations from 68 countries were environment award winner Laos-based Sunlabob Renewable Energy, which rents solar charging stations to entrepreneurs who then rent out solar lamps to local villagers. The Lucknow, India-based Digital StudyHall community-generated video project has earned one of the education awards for creating a database of classroom instruction that can be accessed by teachers in rural areas and urban slums.

The Tech Museum of Innovation created the awards to recognize new approaches to the most critical issues facing humanity and the planet and will award a $50,000 cash prize to one laureate in each category this week. Professor Muhammad Yunus will receive this year's Global Humanitarian Award for his work in pioneering and promoting microcredit finance.

The one-of-a-kind collaborative playground that Zune Arts offers to artists, musicians, and designers has created some of the most innovative, beautiful, and sometimes plain whacked out digital shorts we've ever seen. For their fearless support of pushing artistic boundaries, they deserve as many accolades as can be thrown at them. When it comes to being honoured, there's nothing quite like having your work inducted into the permanent collection of New York's iconic Museum of Modern Art.

On June 3rd at the 17th annual AICP Show, the announcement dropped that Zune Arts' “Masks” is headed for a permanent home in MoMA's film archive. Created by legendary NYC-based animation collective PandaPanther (a.k.a. Jonathan Garin and Naomi Nishimura) and set to music by The Black Angels, “Masks” takes the timeless idea of seeing the world through someone else's eyes and gives it an exceptionally well-crafted spin. The result is relevant and undeniably powerful. If you haven't seen it yet (and even if you have), check it out now in all it's glory.

Zune Arts is on a roll. Last year, “Generous Monster” was the first of their films to be inducted into MoMA's permanent collection. No pressure or anything, but we can't wait to see which new Zune Arts masterpiece will possibly make it three in a row…

The world we live in sure is a strange place. Through all of the discovery, triumph, struggle, strife, greed, glitz, glamour and gore there is plenty for Earth's inhabitants to digest; the one consistent thing that seems to come out of the craziness of it all it seems to be a wealth of compelling stories and images recording all of the ups and downs that both man and mother nature made. Sometimes if we don't have the stories, the images are left to tell the tale themselves. The winners of the World Press Photo of The Year Contest for 2007 seem to speak more than those proverbial thousands words and serve to effective transplant us to a time and place whether we wish they were there or are glad we were not.

Image credits: left, Tim Hetherington, UK, (Vanity Fair); right, Bold Hungwe, Zimbabwe (Independent)

It was a little over a month ago when we told you about Core 77's Greener Gadgets competition…so if you had a design for a Green Gadget and you snoozed until now, well, you inevitably “losed.” The design competition submission deadline was January 27th and the results on the greenest gadgets of them all are in. The winner of the $2,500 grand prize went to Matt Meshulam and Zach Dwiel for their EnerJar, a DIY device that “measures the power draw of electrical appliances” and can be easily assembled by mostly anyone…even a monkey! Actually we're not sure about the monkey thing but we do know that the EnerJar can go a long way towards teaching people just how much electricity their appliances use, encouraging them to reduce their usage of the valuable resource. The EnerJar wasn't the only winner on display, but we don't have the space to talk about them all so we recommend checking out the winners at the Core 77 site, as there were many worthwhile projects in the running.

Because my bladder’s the size of a pea, I get to know a lot of bathrooms on an intimate basis. But besides learning the rough way about the fine nuances of different types of toilet paper here in Sao Paulo, I’ve also noticed beautiful sink designs installed in some of these bathrooms, the wide majority of them stamped with the logo of a national company called Deca. They’ve actually just won an IF Design award in Germany for their upcoming Cuba L 1036 model in the Cuba range of sinks, a collection that emphasizes shape to encourage imaginative play for a bathroom layout. Made with fine fireclay, the L 1036’s washbasin has sloping sides that go from thin at the top to thicker at the bottom, a design that mimics the movement of water as it comes out of the faucet, strikes the bottom and bounces up along the interior. I have to admit that each time I’ve encountered a Deca sink, my bathroom experience is all the much better for it.

If you’re in the mood for more neat, smart and fun designs, stop by the Online Exhibition area of the IF Design site to check out winning entries from hundreds of other companies in categories like transportation and leisure/lifestyle, including the convenient modular-shelved bookcase called Insert Coin, by German company Neuland.

Munich-based Matthias Demacker’s origami.series, a set of designs inspired by the art of paper folding, was just awarded a prestigious red dot design award. Ranked as one of the largest and most renowned design competitions in the world, the red dot award generally receives over 6,000 submissions annually, and to be granted the distinction of a red dot ensures a designer’s ranking among the best of the business. Demacker’s design — available in two sizes and four colors — was manufactured from aluminum, allowing the elegant and fragile appearance of origami to be translated into sturdy piece of furniture with a delicate facade. The origami.series was designed for van-Esch, and their site lists a few dealers overseas that may stock the pieces (disclaimer: The site is in Dutch, so I could be wrong about that), but if you just want to browse Demacker’s other phenomenal work for various clients you can find it here.

Since we’ve got such a talented bunch of readers, we thought we’d share a few links to some high-profile design competitions that you should know about (and you probably already do, but just in case). HOW, the graphic design magazine that’s been around since ‘85, is currently accepting entries for two of their high-profile competitions: the Interactive Design Awards and the International Design Awards. Winners of both competitions will be featured in How’s April 2008 Design Annual. Application fees for both of these competitions are very affordable, and they’re pretty abstract as to what’s eligible for judging, so don’t be shy — go for it!

Yesterday, PC World released their rankings of 2007’s best sites, PCs, HDTVs, services and components. Aside from the fact that I’m only familiar with about a handful of the list’s mentions (yeah, as it turns out, Canonical Ubuntu 7.04 is a Linux update, not an anthropological excavation site), I can still say from my admittedly naive perspective that the list does a killer job cluing in readers as to what they might want to pay attention to in regards to the future of technology. Not surprisingly, Google Apps Premier Edition grabbed the number one spot, followed closely by the Intel Core 2 Duo, the Blackberry 8800, and ninety-seven other techy wonders, including Meebo, Guitar Hero 2 (rock out!) and of course, the MacBook Pro, which I can personally vouch for as a ray of sunshine in a dark-with-PCs planet. Long story shortest, if you’re in the market for a nicely packaged course in current technology, this list will get you updated faster than SightSpeed 6. I don’t really know what that is- but, uh, it sounds fast– so go read, readers.

The nominees have just been announced for Modern Postcard’s 2007 Spotlight Awards, and we were elated to see our favorite shutterfly and Spear Collective member Zach Cordner on the exclusive list of finalists. He was one of five photographers (out of 400 entrants!) to make the cut in that category. The voting is open through the end of May, so you all should go take a look at some of the finalists’ work and vote for Zach, or someone else if you like their work more (we’re biased, but we’re entitled). The three awards categories are artists, graphic designers/ illustrators, and photographers, so you’ll surely see a diverse body of work among those in the drastically whittled down judging pool. Congrats Zach, and may Monkey Boy triumph over all who stand in his way! He sure made a great April calendar image for the Spear Collective Calendar. Monkey Boy is after jump.

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Yesterday, Seattle’s internet consulting team SEOmoz announced their Web 2.0 Award winners for the year. During the decsion process, the SEOmoz team took a hard look at hundreds of Web 2.0 sites and picked the crème de la crème in 41 categories. From that point, they chose 25 Web 2.0 experts to vote on the winners. After the experts voted, SEOmoz went even further to interview 15 of the top sites’ creators to give us all a little insight into the details of the creation process for a top Web 2.0 website. I’m definitely adding this list of award winners to my compilation of helpful 2.0 resources. Already, I’m seeing some sites I hadn’t heard of that I want to explore.

You’d think the first priority doing business in the interactive design industry would be investing in one’s own corporate identity– after all, that’s the first place clients look (whether it’s your business cards or website) for a showcase of the true potential you have to offer. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve ditched a card after someone claimed to be a graphic or web designer, but then I realize I’m holding a free VistaPrint business card or clicked through to a shoddily-crafted website. It’s not about vanity, it’s about displaying your talents in the most effective and creative way possible, and there shouldn’t be extended periods of downtime or redesigns. Investing in your own brand is plain commonsense.

Red Interactive Agency is a perfect example to follow: not only is their client list as extensive as it is impressive (HBO, Comedy Central & Lionsgate, to name a few), they were recently awarded the Best Self-Promotional Site and Best of Show at the FITC Awards for their own amazingly slick and original flash-based site. In short, it’s like Second Life for people with lives short attention spans. After you plug in a name and pick a character, take a spin around their Tim Burton-esque wonderland and interact with others in a variety of ways, be it practicing your white-man’s overbite and busting a move, or smacking them in the face with pan. Oh, and you can chat, too. All that and the pertinent information about their company is right there, seamlessly displayed on the same page. Brings new meaning to the word “interactive”, don’t you think?

For all of our East Coast creative types: On April 19th at the ADC Gallery, The Art Directors Club of New York will be hosting the first of a four-part lecture series that explores the history, hurdles, goals and aspirations of recipients of the ADC Young Gun Award (a bid-deal international competition that identifies the most promising innovative new talent in all fields of visual communication). The first event of Young Guns Live, “The Women Vanguard,” is taking place April 19th at the ADC gallery and will feature designers like Stella Bugbee and Deanne Cheuk. While I would certainly love to sit in on that, I think the biggest source of inspiration for attendees may come from the hour-long Adobe Creative Suite 3 tutorials that will precede each lecture. Because the event is sponsored by Adobe, I bet that the tutorials will be super helpful in figuring out all the neat-o tricks they packed into their latest design bundle. Take a look at the full flyer here for all the info on this and future lectures.

MemoryMiner won the Macworld 2006 Best of Show Award– that fact alone should tell you something about its Web 2.0 prowess. Without going into too much detail (chuckle chuckle), MemoryMiner is a Digital Storytelling application used to discover the threads connecting peoples’ lives across time and place. An innovative desktop application (Mac and Windows) lets you annotate photos in order to specify who is in the picture, where the picture was taken, and when then photo was taken. Drag and drop audio, video, documents and URLs onto photos to add greater depth and context. Each photo thus becomes a frame in an endless storyboard which can be browsed by periods in a person’s life, where people overlap, by place, by time, or any combination. Enlist the help of friends and family in the annotation process using the MemoryMiner Web Annotation Service. MemoryMiner will notify your contacts via email, and all they require to contribute is a web browser. Best of all, their annotations are automatically retrieved into your desktop library. Share your libraries as self-contained MemoryMiner documents, or export gorgeous web sites to a CD, or via automatic upload to any web server. Either way, MemoryMiner replicates the experience of telling stories around a photo album, even when all the people involved can’t be in the same place at the same time.

The consensus seems to be that MemoryMiner has serious potential to transform and rapidly evolve the entire field of photography– in the words of John Schott who is the Chair of Media Studies at Carleton College, “I have studied the history of photography for over 30 years now, and if this program continues to develop and finds its uses and users, I’m predicting that it will go down as a key transformative moment in the evolution of photography. It’s a brilliant application of digital/database logic to photography as personal history and storytelling. I’m gettin’ it.” A couple of other things I’ll point you to: a great explanation of why John Fox created MemoryMiner and an interview Alan Graham (author, designer, consultant) had with Fox at Macworld 2006. Additionally, MM is big on goodwill– it gives grants to k-12 schools, and if you’re a Windows user, they’re looking for people to beta the new Windows version– just email info[AT]memoryminer.com for either. Hat’s off to Mr. Fox for developing such a groundbreaking Web 2.0 application.