For Steve Cavendish, graphics editor at the Chicago Tribune, his annual trip to snowy Syracuse, N.Y., was different this year.
After 10 years of facilitating the Society for News Design competition, Cavendish joined 26 others for three days to judge news designs from 2006.
Their task: sort through the 13,862 entries from 394 publications representing 46 countries and find the best the world had to offer.
Cavendish’s group selected winners for the 18 competition categories included in the contest. I asked him how it went in the e-mail exchange that follows:
1. You were a longtime SND faciliator (assistant to the judges) and have been an SND member since 1993. What is different seeing the competition as a judge?
I think I was a lot more fried, mentally, from being a judge. It requires a ton of concentration. You don’t get a chance to see as much work from the other categories when you’re a judge, either. Somebody asked me this question in Syracuse, and I told them that the biggest difference was that I didn’t have to keep my mouth shut about a page — a real “no-no” if you’re an assistant.
2. Did having been an SND facilitator for so many years affect the way you judged pages?
Not too much. I knew what to expect, so seeing a couple of hundred pages on the table didn’t shock me when I walked into the room. I was actually slower than everyone else in my group, which surprised me.
3. How do you mentally compare dissimilar but deserving pages?
You can’t compare things. You have to evaluate every page on its own merits. Otherwise, you’d only be voting for a single type of page (in my case, The Guardian). When you get into medal discussions, there are some comparisons to be made.
4. How much time do you get to study each entry? And how hard is it to make a decision about a page that quickly?
Enough. I got a chance to read a fair amount of stories and display type. Obviously you don’t have time to read everything on every entry, but if the overall impact of the page isn’t getting my attention, then it’s doubtful that the fourth caption on the page is going to win me over. I think, unfortunately, it was easy to make a quick decision on a lot of pages.
5. Does it matter if you’ve already seen the page on the Web or somewhere else before the judging?
That’s probably the biggest difference from 10 years ago. Between the Newseum site and newsdesigner.com and the portfolio sites like newspagedesigner.com, you see a lot of work before you get to Syracuse. I don’t think it matters that you’ve seen stuff before. There were a couple of pages that I was sure I was going to vote for, but they looked a lot better at 200-pixels wide than at 11 inches wide, so I didn’t.
6. Was it challenging to build consensus for medal-winning pages?
It was challenging in the sense that the judges in our group needed to really be convinced, so there was a lot of back and forth. It was pretty collegial.
7. This year more pages were recognized with SND awards than any other. Was there more work to be recognized or more pages submitted or something else?
Honestly, I think a lot of papers have raised their games. The best news design is just a lot better now than 10 years ago, on average. The best stuff is no longer [headline] [photo] [story] — it’s well layered, and it has a solid graphic or some dynamic quality to it that completely grabs a reader and demands attention (I’m thinking of the Pilot‘s pages.).
8. Was there a single newspaper or designer that particularly surprised you with entries?
Excelsior, a paper out of Mexico City. I thought it was hands down the best thing in the competition. It went from being, charitably, a real piece of dung to being one of the best-designed papers in the world.
9. Having now seen the process from all sides (entering pages, facilitating and judging), what do you think the contest should do to change or improve?
I’m not sure about changes to the competition. I think, the way it’s structured now, you get a fair, albeit subjective, snapshot of the year’s best in visual journalism. It’s never going to be perfect or complete, and I think it’s a mistake to look at it that way. The tabloid papers had their own categories this year, and I think that was a good thing because they really are different beasts on a single-page level. I don’t see it going the way of electronic submission like some of the photo contests, mainly because that’s not how readers encounter these pages.
CORRECTION: The original version of this story incorrectly listed the number of SND judges for the 18 competition categories. There were 27 judges, including Steve Cavendish.
Check out the SND award-winning pages, and let me know if Steve and his colleagues made the right choices.
