‘Best in Show” Awards to SizeChina & Apple

NEW YORK - The Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), the voice of the industrial design profession, advancing the quality and positive impact of design, announced in a press release that out of 1517 entries, 35 were awarded the coveted Gold award, while 77 received Silver awards and 93 won Bronze awards.

For the first time this year, 389 finalists were named in addition to the winners. For the first time in the history of the competition, the expert jury bestowed two “Best in Show” awards: one to SizeChina, a design research project that assembled data from a representative cross-section of people from mainland China to create the first-ever digital database of Chinese head and face shapes; and the other to Apple’s now-iconic iPhone.

Showing a continuing upward trend in international participation, 109 designs from 25 countries outside the US were given an IDEA Award: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, People's Republic of China, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Iran, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

2008 also marked the inaugural year of IDEA/Brasil, organized by Objeto Brasil and endorsed by IDSA, to spur interest in design from Brazilian corporations as well as to heighten global awareness of Brazil’s rich design heritage. Out of 53 pre-judged Brazilian Finalists, 12 were honored with IDEA Awards, a remarkable success for the program’s first year.

The BusinessWeek IDEA report hit the stands July 18 with an in-depth analysis of the winners. IDSA’s quarterly magazine, Innovation, will publish information on the Gold, Bronze and Silver winners as well as the finalists in its Yearbook of Design Excellence this fall.

A “People’s Choice” award will also be presented when the winners are honored in a formal ceremony at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Saturday, September 13, the final day of the anticipated 2008 IDSA National Conference & Education Symposium, followed by a gala celebration. Winners will be displayed in the conference’s Design Gallery. All 205 winners with descriptions, photos and contacts will be featured on the IDSA website , beginning July 18.

The IDEA (International Design Excellence Awards) program is the premier international competition honoring design excellence in products, ecodesign, interaction design, packaging, strategy, research and concepts. Entries are invited from designers, students and companies worldwide.

Winning entries will receive press coverage in BusinessWeek magazine and businessweek.com as well as in hundreds of newspapers and networks, including CNN, NBC, PBS, CNBC, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and the general design press.
IDSA has been honoring design excellence via the IDEA Awards since 1980.

IDEA was formerly known as the Industrial Design Excellence Awards. The name changed in 2007 to emphasize the international reach and influence of the competition.