Hey everyone! I was wondering if there are any upcoming type design competitions? I know the deadline for TDC just passed, but perhaps in the coming months? I have a typeface I have been working on that is quite extraordinary, but has no real market value >.< it's a load of fun, and I feel I need to enter it in a competition. Perhaps any student oriented competitions? Thanks!
Simon.
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2: If it has a non-Latin (heh, heh, heh... :-) for sure go for Granshan.
If I won having paid $155 I'd be thrilled. Happier than I have been as a loser who paid $65.
Some competitions actually GIVE prizes to winners, rather than asking money from the winners.
BTW my purpose in consistently bringing up this flaw has always been not to shame the TDC but motivate it to find a better way. The TDC does good work, but we can all do better.
Single is for one font family only?
And series are for a couple of families where they share same typeface design (i.e. sans serif, serif, stencil versions)?
As the two extensive surveys from Mary Catherine Pflug have revealed, retail customers really don't give a hoot about awards. But I do believe –especially in this age of marketing via social media– that the word-of-mouth/mindshare aspect of winning an award very much matters for commissioned work. This is not unlike speaking at a conference.
I've entered a good amount of competitions since the late '90s (although –maybe tellingly– not any lately) and have been pretty fortunate, statistically — and although I have little to no formal evidence, my impression has been that it puts me on the radar of people who otherwise don't know I exist, which must help.
My general advice is to choose competitions not just for their prestige, but most of all based on your chances of winning being decent.
http://competition.morisawa.co.jp/en/
I'm not sure about the current details, but in the past it's been not only free to enter, but comes with large monetary prizes.
I enter the TDC competition because I'm mostly making custom types for clients, so my work doesn't get the exposure of marketing that fonts for retail licensing would. I also think the TDC does a good job in selecting judges: the jury is regularly made up of people whose opinion I respect.
As far as I know the TDC is the only one that does. Even if the TDC spends more promoting the winners, to me that's more unfair than a slightly higher entry fee that simply accounts for a known eventual expense. And as we can see in this thread, it causes people to not submit. In contrast, I've never heard anybody say they would submit if only the entry fee were $8 lower.
Concerning the quality of the jury, it's usually quite high when it comes to Latin. However when it comes to non-Latin, I find the TDC's approach far inferior to Granshan's, at the very least in terms of being way too opaque. Even protoType managed to handle non-Latin more graciously.
If it's a superfamily I imagine TDC allows multiple pages?
As it is, I find it impossible to muster the time or enthusiasm to design and make entries on a speculative basis; I have enough trouble preparing banner ads for use by the distributors of retail fonts.
It's utterly silly, but some people love to buy this shit so they can congratulate themselves