Excerpts from Jessica Helfand, "Great Opportunities: Celebrating Design English Style." AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, 12:3 (Winter 1995) 9-10.

Like any other design competition, the BBC Design Awards were created to acknowledge excellence in design. But unlike the inbred parochialism that most design competitions cultivate, the BBC variant is a voting free-for-all that critically depends upon its public. Thus, moments before the much-hyped Navratilova-Martinez match at Wimbledon last July, the network ran a 15-minute segment highlighting its graphic design finalists, with a call-in number at the end for viewers to cast their votes. I subsequently found paper ballots at various museums around London (one of which is pictured here) which modeled themselves on a more traditional voting methodology: Either way, the public was a vital and integral component in the decision process. They were the ultimate jury.

In a gesture sure to appeal to lovers of Monty Python, the BBC presented a series of non-design critics to describe and discuss the relative merits of each candidate. So the CD Very, released last year by the Pet Shop Boys (and designed by Pentagram) was reviewed not by Neville Brody but by the staff at Pet World. Their observations were simple: no in-depth analyses of type or style or, for that matter, of design itself. The criteria for evaluation were specific and functional: Would you stop to look at it in a store? Would you pick it up? Would you buy it? Looking quizzically at the orange plastic reverse-perforated surface of the jewell case, one middle-aged staffer summarized in plain English what was most likely the designers? objective with this garish, non-traditional packaging.

'Hmm,' she purred. 'Different.'

In a promotional segment for the Guardian, one of Britain's more liberal newspapers, a typographic collage (by Tomato design's Graham Wood) cuts quickly through a foggy landscape, with words culled from newspaper headlines poking through haphazard shards of color and light. The BBC selected Bedford Prison's English class to critique this piece. The prisoners' comments, heavily accented and monosyllabic, were largely unintelligible to me--although the Yorkshire cadences of one inmate were eerily reminiscent of the narrator's voice in last year's What is Multimedia? CD ROM published by 8vo as the much-awaited terminal issue of Octavo.

The three other finalists included a streamlined soap packaging line for Boots (Britain's answer to Rite-Aid drugstores) reviewed by a woman who had the unusual distinction of being a soap box collector herself; a billboard for an environmental watchdog group (a warning about acid rain printed on a kind of litmus paper that actually changed color when rained upon) reviewed by the worker putting up the billboard; and a promotional campaign advertising sportswear for Levi Strauss, reviewed by "Leeds clubbers" (people who hang out in clubs in Leeds, and are, presumably, the targeted consumers of such sportswear). The soap collector's conoisseurship made her the most insightful critic, but was ultimately no more or less interesting than the others.

Ironically, despite it's goofy entertainment angle, these awards are clearly perceived as a serious business that actively engages the public's design awareness. And ultimately, the beauty of this approach lies in its appeal to reality. It celebrates the mundane, the everyday, the banal. It asks simple questions, even stupid questions. It highlights the unpredictable and highly varied audience we all try to reach. It ignores the exalted status and object worship of so many design competitions, and it donates fifteen minutes of fame to the non-design luminaries who generously shared their time and opinions.

Most important, this is something you would never see in this country, let alone on national television, let alone on primetime before a sporting event. The CNN Design Awards? The HBO Design Awards? The CBS-QVC-Comcast-Barry Diller-Lawrence Tisch Design Awards?

In the end, the litmus-paper billboard took the prize. It is not impossible to imagine that a distinguished panel of professional designers would have ended up with the same conclusion: but how much more intriguing--and indeed, validating--to get there through a truly democratic voting process. And so, in a stunning reversal of the rhetorical admonition 'physician, heal thyself' ('designer, judge thyself?) the BBC Awards have proved that--with a little help from the magic of television--the public is eminently capable of evaluating design with wit, intelligence and purpose.

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