New Work: Art Directors Club Annual 90
Oscars, Emmys, Grammys… In our humble opinion, the best-designed—and named—award may be the Cube, the signature trophy of the Art Directors Club Annual Awards. Now in its 90th year, the ADC competition honors the best work of the year in design and advertising. For the 90th anniversary, the ADC invited Pentagram’s Paula Scher, a laureate of the ADC Hall of Fame, to design the Art Directors Club Annual 90, out now.
For the annual, Scher created playful illustrations of the iconic ADC Cube to introduce the various competition sections throughout the book’s standard format. Each section is opened by an interpretation of the category: rolling cubes for the lifetime achievement Hall of Fame award, a pattern for the Design section, a pixel-like network of cubes for Photography, monitor-like cubes for Advertising. A hand-drawn pattern of cubes appears as endpapers and debossed on the book’s cover. The annual also contains a portfolio of the 90th Cube Project, in which the ADC asked past award winners for their own interpretations of the Cube.
Pentagram’s Michael Bierut served as jury chair of the competition’s Design section. Winners were announced last fall. Copies of the annual will be distributed to ADC members in the coming weeks.
Pentagram has been collaborating with several organizations on the design of annuals this awards season. Harry Pearce recently designed the D&AD Annual, Paula Scher will be creating this year’s Type Directors Club Annual, and Luke Hayman was recently announced as designer of the Society of Publication Designers Annual. Scher previously designed the AIGA Annual in 2008.
Project Team: Paula Scher, partner-in-charge and designer; Reed Burgoyne, designer.