ADC Young Guns 7 Competition & Review of Past Winners

The big leagues of design competitions for young designers with winners we should all know.

What is Young Guns

The ADC Young Guns Competition is an international competition aimed at finding the very best of up and coming designers and artists in a wide range of fields and mediums. They take work from graphic design, photography, illustration, advertising and art direction, environmental design, film, animation, video, interactive design, object design and typography. The contest is meant to spotlight the best of the best under 30 in the design and creative community. This year’s competition is open but with a hefty entry fee and stiff competition, winning will be no easy feat.

Why it’s great

Young Guns is great because of the title. The focus on young designers and creatives is an excellent way to emphasize the importance of young talent especially concerning the work of freelancers. “For young talent who usually don’t get the spotlight, ADC Young Guns provides a global stage for them to shine and be recognized in their own right.” There is a lot of competition between young firms and young individual designers in this competition but there have been some truly outstanding individual winners.

What you need to win

Get it straight from a past winner. “Unlike other award programs, ADC Young Guns recognizes an individual, and considers a body of work, not just a single ad or design,” said Rei Inamoto, co-chief creative director at AKQA and an ADC Young Guns 4 winner. Winners have a very cohesive body of work that works together but spans a broad range of media and technique. If you look at some winning work, you can see the type of work that gets noticed and how multidisciplinary it all is.

What winners get

In previous years you would get a gallery exhibition at the ADC and of course the Young Guns Cube. Your work would also get printed in the Young Guns Annual and win a one year subscription to the ADC. In addition to all of these things, Young Guns 7 includes $1,500 in ADC grants, $1000 for the top winner and $250 for two runners-up. As always, the career boosting benefits are pretty significant.

Past winners & role models

The list of past winners is quite extensive on the site with multiple winners for each of the previous 6 years of competition. I thought I would pick out a few of my favorite winners from the past and show you their winning work.

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Nicholas Felton is probably the most interesting from this list to me. I have a great passion for information graphics and Feltron has some of the best in his annual reports designed for himself. He is the founder of Daytum, which is a fantastic site that I love to use to track my life in numbers. He is a fantastic designer in general that you should check out.

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Stephan Sagmeister was the winner of the first ADC Young Guns competition and hasn’t stopped being awesome since. He is a very famous man but for those who don’t know he is widely recognized for his AIGA Detroit Poster in which he carved the poster information into his own flesh and took a photograph. Since then he has been a part of several more amazing projects and is a fantastically talented man and a deserving winner.

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Adam Levite is primarily a music video producer but is also a very well recognized graphic designer with pieces in many publications, the library of congress, and design museums. His pint work is quite well known and if you visit his site be sure to check out all of his great posters.

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John Kudos participated and won in the 6th Young Guns Competition. His work ranges from identity to website to book and even environmental spaces. He worked at pentagram under the direction of Abbott Miller to produce “Superheroes; Fashion and Fantasy” which was a catalog for an exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art. Another interesting project of his is Artland, A Special Project for Splotches.org, which is illustrates an abbreviated survey of how various artists have touched New York City in the last century.

I don’t know if I will be entering the contest this year but the winners list is a great resource of up and coming designers to inspire all of us. It’s important to look at our contemporaries and to measure ourselves against them. Setting goals is important to any career and one of my goals is to be a winner in this competition before I am 30.

What are you goals and what are your thoughts on the Young Guns competition?

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