The 83rd Art Director’s Club Annual Award Show is on view at the ADC Gallery in New York City. The Art Director’s Club, also known as the ADC, is a rather prestigious organization for creatives in the design and advertising industries.

The term “art director” means and encompasses different disciplines. There are art directors who design, art directors who don’t design, designers who are illustrators, illustrators who don’t design, etc. Within this Annual Award Show, there are six different categories: Advertising, Graphic Design, Interactive Media, Multi-Channel, Photography & Illustration. It is a rather broadly defined field.

The ADC’s Annual Award Show is one way to catch the pulse of the current trend in design and art direction at large. However, it’s probably not the definitive way to see what’s best at the time.

Of the six categories, there was a skew towards Advertising and Graphic Design – there were way more winners and the quality of the work seemed to be higher in those categories. For instance, in the Photography & Illustration category, there were no gold winners. In Interactive Media, a category that was added to the ADC a few years ago, there were only 6 winners, gold and silver combined (there were 12 gold winners in Advertising, 10 gold winners in Graphic Design).

In the Interactive Media, some of the winners that stood out were:
cbcradio3.com – a webzine-type site from a radio channel
i-shake-u.com – an unlike promotional site from Japan for Mitsubishi Motors
vodafone.com/futurevision – a marketing site with high production value for Vodafone

Compared to other award shows, the selection of interactive work is a bit weak and thin. Possibly due to the lack of entries, what’s represented as winners didn’t really reflect what’s best in this medium, unfortunately.

The 83rd Art Director’s Club Annual Award
Date: Until July 31st, 2004
Place: ADC Gallery
Address: 106 West 29th Street, NY, NY 10001
https://www.adcglobal.org