Account Services

Account Services
A' Design Award & Competition offers several account services that could be ordered by participants. Since these services relate to modifying accounts, administrative fees apply and a payment is required. The payment made also helps to legally establish the basis to make changes, and helps us prove that the changes were made upon participants' requests and with consent.

Automated Password Reset Service
The Automated Password Reset Service is a free service that allows users to reset their passwords by providing their account email addresses. Password recovery is not possible using this service; a new password will be provided for you but you will be able to update it later. To reset your password, simply click here.

Account Merge Service
The Account Merge service allows two A' Design Awards accounts to be merged together under single account. (Two profiles merge into one) In this case, one of the accounts is chosen as the Primary Account, the other account is indicated as the Secondary Account. When ordered, all designs registered in the secondary account is ported to the Primary Account. For this service to be ordered, both accounts must belong to the same party, or both parties should consent merge. Order this service by first making the service fee payment, and after please kindly contact support. Support team might require further documents or proof of identity, in most cases we need confirmation via email by both account holder emails.

Account Split Service
The Account Split service allows a single A' Design Awards account to be seperated into two accounts. (One profile splits into two). Before ordering this service, a new Secondary account should exist. Account split orders must be communicated via email. Designers should indicate which Design ID#'s to be shifted to the Secondary account. Order this service by first making the service fee payment, and after please kindly contact support. Support team might require further documents or proof of identity. Please note that when we merge the accounts, designs may not show in your profile until we update our databases.

Account Modification Service
The Account Modification service allows to change the ownership of an A' Design Awards account. In this case, the previous owner is required to consent the changes. Upon order, a new account is created and all the information of the old account is ported to this new account, the User ID and Profile ID Email Address Changes are part of the Account Modification Service. Order this service by first making the service fee payment, and after please kindly contact support. Support team might require further documents or proof of identity.

Account E-Mail Update Service
The Account E-Mail Update service allows the registrants to update their email accounts. While it may seem as a trivial operation, it need manual intervention and database access. Furthermore, a fee is requested to justify the change; i.e. a payment is required to prove that a valid person is requesting the email change, this is indeed necessary for security purposes.

Account Recovery Service
The Account Recovery Service is a paid account service that allows users to gain access to an account that has been inaccessible since the password is invalid and email account has also been changed. Order this service by first making the service fee payment, and after please kindly contact support. Support team might require further documents or proof of identity.

Consulate or Embassy Email Service
A’ Design Award and Competition provides gala-night winners and their guests a complimentary official letter of invitation in English with all winner details. This letter can be freely downloaded by professional edition competition participants from their gala-night panels. However, if the Consulate or Embassy requires a “more official” letter in English that is printed, stamped, scanned and emailed to them directly from our own addresses, in this case you can order “Consulate or Embassy Email Service“. Any request for “sending email to consulate” will be considered as an order of “Consulate or Embassy Email Service” and your account will be credited with the amount indicated in this page. Important to Note: 1. Ordering this service does not guarantee a Visa status, and 2. This is not the legal letter of invitation. 3. We will not attach any Identity Cards or their scans but company details if required. 4. We do not provide insurance or guarantee for you. 5. We do not provide hosting or accommodation nor guarantee this for you.

Design Update Service
A’ Design Award & Competition locks the designs during evaluation and after their results are announced. This means that there cannot be any changes in evaluated designs. While this no-change principle is definitely required for visuals and for technical specifications and details of award winning works, there are pieces of information that could be altered post-competition. These pieces of information are: Design Name, Designer Name, Inspiration, Yearbook Text, Yearbook Description or similar items which do not have weight during evaluation of the design for award consideration. We must note that even though updates would be made at A’ Design Award platform, updating design information, especially in other magazines or websites is not easy and in most cases impossible once the design is published. In this case, the information update is usually limited to A’ Design Award Website and any future publications. To have the names and information updated, companies requesting the change must send a written communication which also indicates the reasons, and furthermore an administrative fee must be paid to have this operation made manually, for each design.

Design Unlock Service
After the final preliminary screening of your design, during jury voting or awards status announcement, your design will be locked. When your design is locked you can no longer make changes. The design unlock service can be ordered in these periods to unlock your work to allow you to make changes. Before results are announced, you can make any change you wish, however after results announcement or voting you can only alter design details for design description text including Design Name, Design Team member name but not images (since your work would have been voted on the images and text you provided and changing these would require re-evaluation of your work). When you order this service, any of your existing Licenses may be deleted together with any cached files and any file we prepared for you; these cached files will be removed to ensure changes that are made would be reflected in result page, profile page, design page and all other pages. If you order this service after results announcement, before this service is provided, we will make a backup of your entry. After results announcement, unless permitted you cannot change images or the design itself completely, you can only update the text to make corrections for example fixing typos, language or names. You can order this service from this list below.

Design Restoration Service
If you delete your design yourself from your control panel you might request a design restoration service to undelete or recover the design. We can try to restore your project by requesting backups from the datacenter as well as a hard copy of the documents that relate to the deleted project to restore the design entry using existing online or offline backups. This service does not guarantee that your design could be undeleted, if we cannot recover your design you will not be charged and we will disqualify the design since we cannot keep any design as a winner without its images or text present in our database. If we recover your design, you will be charged with the design restoration service fee.

Urgent Account or Design Removal
It is free to remove your account or designs from A’ Design Award & Competition: you can remove your profile, account and designs easily from your control panel, there are no fees. However once you win the design award, it is not possible to remove your entries, due to our infrastructure, this is because award winning works are manually copied to several servers, and the results of the competition are cached; the design pages are locked, and the content is no longer dynamically served (it is read from a static cache file). The fee of this service covers removal of the design from our cached platforms, however it does not cover removal from any other webpages or magazines where the design is published; i.e. if your design got featured in some publications, we cannot remove it, however we could contact publications on your behalf to request removal for an additional cost. We cannot also remove your design from our book, if we already printed the book but if it is a very serious case we could for example put a sticker to such pages again with added cost, this cost covers removal of posters from exhibition, removal of name from world design rankings, designer rankings, design classifications, and removal of projects from salone del designer. This service is only for people who have for example submitted the wrong design, or who had submitted a design that shall be kept hidden, alternatively we want to note that if you wish, we could simply hide the project without deletion of the files (by changing the award category to concealed award category) so you keep your rankings and profile but your projects are not displayed. This last option usually asked by companies who wish to protect trade secrets or who need to obey non disclosure agreements. Furthermore we especially do not remove awarded works to ensure they are not accidentally removed. Once you make the payment for this service, please contact support.

Forced Disqualification Fee
If you participate at A' Design Award, your design will be locked after results announcement and you will no longer be able to make modifications, except for subtle changes that might be required for publications; such as enhancing the quality of images or providing a bit of extra text for press purposes. However, if you make too much changes; and too much change is defined as any type of change that could have potentially effected the outcome of a design's award status during voting; i.e. any change potent enough to effect or change award status (for better or worse), such as removing some images or replacing them with white images, then your work will get disqualified and you will be asked but not obliged to pay Forced Disqualification Fee, however this fee will be registered as a negative credit and if your account is too low in negative credits we might suspend the services provided to you. We especially have this policy because we have internal and external inspections regarding voted designs and voting system to have a fair platform, and for example if you change your design images to all white, or remove text etc, after results announcement, when inspections are made, it looks unethical that a completely blank or empty design submission might have obtained an award, runner up or participant status, thus especially when you remove all images, text and data from an entry, as well as when you make too much changes to your design that could have effected voting results, you accept and agree that your work will be disqualified, and a disqualification fee would be noted as written and stated in terms and agreements 78.45 This fee is valid regardless of your entry is concealed or not because both concealed as well as non-concealed entries get inspected.

Credit Card Refund Fee
When we refund an item for a Credit Card Payment, we do not get back the %3 percent commission we pay to the bank or payment gateway provider or point of sales device provider, for small payments we usually do not ask this amount back, but for large payments we would ask you to pay for it, it is calculated by the whole amount; if you make 1000 payment and get 500 refund, the %3 is calculated based on the initial 1000. When this happens, we would register a negative credit in your account.

PayPal Refund Fee
When we refund an item for a PayPal Payment, we do not get back the %6 percent commission we pay to paypal, this amount is calculated based on the whole amount in case of a partial refund; if you make 1000 payment and get 500 refund, the %6 is calculated based on the initial 1000. When this happens, we would register a negative credit in your account.

Category Change : Concealed Category to Regular Category Conversion
If you submitted your design to a Concealed Category, you might request a change from Concealed Category to Regular Category after results announcement. We remind that there are additional rules and conditions that apply; for example even if you request your entry category to be changed from Concealed Category to Regular Categories, your work cannot be included in the yearbook or in the exhibition or any other mediums that require advance planning or design. Furthermore not all concealed to regular requests will be considered, we reserve right to refuse change from concealed category to regular category for any reason, therefore before requesting this service you must first get a confirmation from us by contacting us with a very clear request. indicating us clearly the design ID Number and the number of the new requested (regular) category or to “appropriate category” that we could choose. We cannot change the category of your entry from concealed to regular without a very clear request, as you might understand that there are many people who submit to concealed categories for actually concealing their work, and any ambiguous request will therefore be discarded. We cannot change from concealed category to regular category without participants making a very clear request that the category shall be changed. We reserve right to change it to a different regular category then you request. Furthermore, when changing from Concealed Category to Regular Category, your award level could potentially be updated; your award level could be upgraded or downgraded, as the scores must be recalculated for the new category, however in most cases, the regular categories are more competitive thus it is normal to see award level degraded (downgraded) when changing from concealed to regular category.

Category Change : Regular Category to Concealed Category Conversion
Some entrants might want to conceal the results of their entries upon award announcement, for a variety of reasons including but not limited to PR (for example some large enterprises order this service for their runner-up or other work that did not win a Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze or Iron award), while some companies order this service for IP (Intellectual Property issues, to have time for patent applications or to cover their trade secrets), and some designers order this service as required by their clients (such as NDA – Non Disclosure Agreements, or for example if they did a design that involves trade-secrets etc.). Regardless of the reason, conversion to Concealed category does not completely remove the design and you will keep your rankings and profile but the designs will not be shown, press release not made and of course it will not be published. You may order this service within 36 hours of award announcement, otherwise it could be too late. i.e. we might start your PR in advance, so we advise to order in advance if you plan to hide it, in general most entrants will never order this service as ordering this service will exclude you from PR campaign.

Category Change : Pre-Voting Category Change Service
After Nomination, before voting takes place and before results are announced, you can request your design award category to be changed to another category. In most cases, the A' Design Award's pre-screening jury panel might already move your entry to the correct design award category, free of charge, if we think it would be to your benefit; this complimentary category change is only made if the pre-screening jury believes that your entry would get a higher score in another, better suited category or if your entry does not fit the nominated category, however this change of category is not always provided and is not guaranteed to happen, sometimes your design could fit the category for which it was nominated for, even though it might have a better result or higher evaluation in another category. In this case, the pre-screening jury would not update your category, even though if preliminary jury had suggested you to update; the pre-screening jury or the grand-jury does not see these suggestions provided by the preliminary jury; award jury as well as the pre-screening jury does not have access to the score and feedbacks provided by the preliminary jury. Therefore, if the preliminary jury suggested you to change category after nomination, you might consider but not need to update your category. The service has a fee as it requires manual intervention. To use this service, first pay the Category Change Service, second send an email or contact support indicating your design ID number and the new category.

Category Change : Post-Voting Category Change Service
After nomination, but before results announcement, if you did not choose an award category to nominate to, of if you choose a wrong award category, or if you believe your design could have achieved a better result in another category, you can ask us to have your work voted in another category or you can ask us to choose the best fit category for your entry, and we will do our best (but we of course do not guarantee any results just to be clear) to choose the right category that would potentially result in the highest evaluation of your entry i.e. by shifting it to the right design award nomination category. This category change is expensive as it will most likely result in your design being re-voted at the last moment, and of course this would also require that we have to re-calculate z-scores and re-order entries in the both categories (the category from which your design is moved from as well as the category to which your design is moved to).

Category Change : Category Recommendation Service
Before nomination, you can ask us to recommend you free of charge a category for your design, it is really simple; upload your design and then contact our support with your Design ID# that you are given during upload and ask for recommendation for nomination category.

Design Withdrawal Service
Before Voting Starts: Participants can withdraw their designs from the competition, free of charge, before the end of late deadline, by simply removing or deleting their designs from their control panel, plus participants should send a confirmation to the design award support to ensure the entry is marked withdrawn but not disqualified. After Voting Starts: We are unable to permit participants to withdraw designs since jury is already voting them, yet if you need to withdraw your design after voting starts (anytime after late entry period, including last and omega entry periods), you could order the design withdrawal service so that we could intervene manually to gracefully remove your design from the competition.

Award Status Cancellation Service
The A' Design Award and Competition follows a peer review mechanism based on criteria voting and score normalization to evaluate entries, works that rank at higher percentiles get higher award status while works that rank at lower percentiles get lesser award status or runner-up or participant status which are displayed in your profiles. While the result of the competition cannot be altered, participants could request to withdraw or hide their weak works before results are announced in case they wish to avoid lesser award status displayed at their profiles. Hiding weak works are possible in three ways first by moving designs to concealed category or second by the removal of designs and third by having their award status cancelled. The service to withdraw was requested and initially designed for very large enterprises and design companies who wish to retain a high brand profile by hiding lesser award status entries. Withdrawal is free before award status announcement to winners but it is not free after results announcement to winners (different from result status announcement to public). We especially do not wish to provide cancellation service to keep the integrity of the competition, as well as to avoid the bureaucracy, thus we also ask participants who wish to dance their award status to write a formal request, this formal letter and eventual paint of the award status cancellation service helps us avoid cancellation of your award status by a maleficent third party who could have access to your email. If you wish to Cancel award status you need to order the "Award Status Cancellation" service. Important to know: you cannot request restoration of award status once this service is provided. Instead of ordering this service we suggest to order movement to concealed categories. Please remember to read about the "Move to Concealed Category Service" for moving your entry to concealed category before making this decision as the "Move to Concealed Category Service" is easier to provide and costs less. Please do not confuse this service with Nomination Status Cancellation Service.

Nomination Status Cancellation Service
This is a service you can order only if your design has not yet been assigned a status (i.e. entries with Null-Status who are queued for results but did not have a status set in database) latest 15 days prior deadline announcement date. In this case, there is no award status to cancel; the design is not awarded nor a runner-up nor does not have participant status. When you order this service, your nomination is cancelled, your entry is taken out of competition, could potentially be also deleted, your fee is not returned but you will be given a nomination ticket for nominating another or same entry within 365 days. This service can only be ordered once per nominated design. Nomination Status Cancellation Service does not reset the preliminary score but only nomination status; it takes your Null-Status work out of competition; this service could only be orderable for any entries regardless of nomination status. The service costs 75 Euro. The new ticket will be valid for 365 days, so that it could be used to nominate a design now or within the 365 days.

Temporary Concealment Service
This service can be ordered to conceal or hide a design from the A’ Design Award & Competition website for a limited time period of up to 365 days. If the design has been published at other publications, articles or features at these publications will not be concealed or hidden. Furthermore, the service cannot hide articles at traditional media either. This service could be requested under following issues: Patent Applications, Intellectual Property Disputes, Trade Secret Protection etc. To request this service, please order the “Temporary Concealment Service” from this page. When this service is ordered, your design is not deleted, but is moved to Concealed Category 999, which means your designs will no longer be visible online at A’ Design Awards. Learn more about concealed design award categories. Upon ordering this service, we will change category of your design to “Concealed”, we will then delete winners page, the design details page and also update your profile page and hide the design.

Technical Disqualification Re-Evaluation
This special service can only be ordered if your design was disqualified due to technical issues in your presentation. These issues can be for example problems in images, identification marks or anything else that would result in your entry from being properly judged, for example it could be a case that you did a good design but if the design was not anonymously presented (such as explicitly adding brand name to images before the results are announced) this design could get disqualified automatically. When you order this service (which can only be ordered if we communicate you the possibility of ordering it), you will have opportunity to contact us and fix the issues and have the design judged rapidly once again to fix the issues that initially resulted the disqualification of the nominated work. Please do not order this service for works that were not disqualified (such as Participant, Runner-Up, Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum awarded entries for it to be rejudged). Please note that this service can only be ordered within 36 hours of results announcement. Ordering this service does not guarantee or imply an award status possiblity and furthermore, your entry would be converted to a digital edition entry.

Technical Status Re-Evaluation
This particular service can only be ordered if we explicitly allow you to order it. We might allow you to order it if your final results is significantly lower than your initial preliminary score. Your final result might be lower than your preliminary score in many cases; 1) if the jury sincerely does not like your entry; if this is the case we will not allow you to order this entry. 2) if your presentation does not comply with submission guidelines; then we could allow you to order this entry and indicate you required changes. 3) if your presentation score was low during the judging process and therefore if the design was eliminated due to biases towards presentation. When you order this service (which can only be ordered if we communicate you the possibility of ordering it), you will have opportunity to edit the design, and fix the issues and have the design judged rapidly once again to fix the issues that initially resulted the down voting of the nominated work. Please note that this service can only be ordered within 36 hours of results announcement. Ordering this service does not guarantee or imply award status improvements, in truth, most designs which order this service do not have their results changed or modified and furthermore, your entry would be converted to a digital edition entry.

Express Judging Re-Review
This particular service may only be ordered if you ordered Express Judging Service and if we decided not to finalize your status at our sole discretion and if we decided to leave your design for re-voting by grand award jury and if you instead request us to have the design re-veviewed and re-voted. We do not advise to order this service, especially if your design was not a winner; we shall be very clear that spending more on services will not change final status, that being said, if you had a poor initial presentation and if you have made very significant improvements to your design, we could re-review your design, if you order Express Judging Re-Review service.

Vector Logo Application
In order to control logo usage, we usually do not provide a vector logo, however depending on different situations we might be able to grant usage of the Vector Logo. In some cases, we might provide very very high resolution files that you could use. Before we grant a vector logo usage and send it to you, we will need to check a few things and consider a permission. If you need a vector logo, please first apply to obtain the logo. While the logo is free of charge, applying for a vector logo costs a bit as we will need to see and check: 1) Where you will use this logo, 2) How many times the logo would be used or viewed (expected impressions or number of integrated copies) and 3) For which medium or product you will use the logo with. We also wish to see and advertising copy whenever possible. The Vector Logo usage right will be granted on a case by case basis. We would like to remind that we provide the logo free of charge from your control panel, and this service shall only be ordered if you need the vector logo and if the high-res logos are not enough for you. Vector logo usage comes with signed license that may be needed by certain enterprises.

Post-Results Image Modification Confirmation Service
When you make changes to an awarded design, you risk your design to be disqualified. In order to ensure that your design would not be disqualified, before making any changes, it is a good idea to consult our team regarding such changes. You do not need to order this service if you are updating textual part, however you might need this service if you are going to modify images. We remind you that any new images must also comply with image and presentation guidelines. After ordering the service, we will ask you for your new images and we will confirm you regarding their update if they comply with our guidelines, otherwise we will ask you to make modifications. You must request the service each time you ask a question, therefore instead of constantly asking the service it is a very good idea to download presentation and image guidelines. There are two conditions in which you do not need to order this service: If we had already contacted you regarding the updates, or if we had sent you an email about any changes required for your images - such as removing text or brand logos from images; in these cases, you do not need to order this service. This should only be ordered after awards announcement, non-awarded works do not need to order this service.

Instant Design Changes Update Service
When you have made some changes to an awarded design, it could take up to 7 days for your dynamic changes to be reflected in various static pages. If your changes are very very important and if you wish to accelerate the update process so that the changes would be reflected immediately, you might like to order instant design changes update service, once you order the service do not ask our support to make the changes for you; first make the changes yourself and then ask our support to update all the static pages with the new information you provided, quickly, by ordering this service. This service is absolutely optional and we remind that any change you would make would normally be reflected within 7 days in any case (after 15 days of award announcement, we update static pages only each 180 days so if you make changes after 15 days of award announcement you might request this service if your changes are not reflected but we would normally provide the service as part of other services in that case). This should only be ordered after awards announcement, non-awarded works do not need to order this service.

Manual Account Email Confirmation & Password Reset Service
This service can be ordered if you are unable to reset your password yourself. You might not reset your password if your account email is not confirmed. To have your account email confirmed normally you would click on the account email confirm link in the registration welcome email. However if you did not do so and later forgot your password you might be unable to reset your password because the system would think that you are trying to reset a password of an account not yet confirmed. In these situations we can manually confirm your account, reset and send you a new password. The service is subject to a fee and could be ordered from Table 1. below.

Manual Intervention Service
In certain cases we might need to modify or remove data from your entry, these cases include but not limited to 1) make it compliant with entry guidelines, 2) if a preliminary jury member noted an issue, 3) if not removing or modifying your data could lead to disqualification, 4) if your data could result in legal issues due to trademark infringement, copyright issues etc, lack of usage permissions etc. 5) if your data makes your entry identifiable 6) if your data could have ethical issues or offensive content. In these cases, we could charge you a small manual intervention fee as noted in terms and conditions 78.55 & 78.56 but you could also order this service yourself in advance if you feel your entry might have some issues and you are not able to make changes yourself (such as during voting periods, or if your entry is locked, or if you can simply not access your entry etc). If you order the service yourself, please also contact us stating the change required.

Legal Letters and Correspondence
In some cases, we may need to send you (including jurors and participants alike) cease-and-desist letters, legal notifications and/or communique, replies to copyright or intellectual property disputes. If this happens, these are going to be subject to fee for preparation of letters and sending such letters whether physically or digitally. There are three levels of this service; level zero (0) - in which we reply to a claim for the first time, if the case is not serious (if we reply ourselves without involving third party advocates) - we may involve our own legal department or our own consultants, level one (1) - in which we prepare send a follow-up letter directly ourselves (if the case is not serious) and level two (2) in which we use an advocate or legal studio to prepare and send the letters for more serious cases, for each letter + there may be additional costs for per hour - moreover even if it is the first time letter if the case is very serious you would incur a level 2 fee. The costs will be for each legal letter or each letter that requires a response. In some cases such as allagetions against you or your work, we may have to respond even if there is not a legal obligation to prevent future litigation and/or loss of our reputation.

Revoke Final Approval for Prestige Opportunity Confirmation
If you notice a mistake in any of Prestige Opportunities that you had given a Final Approval for, we may, provided that there there is enough time before any production, do our best to manually revoke your Final Approval upon your request. Please contact us once you order this service.

Account Type Conversion
The Account Type Conversion service cost depends on the number of nominations made using your previous account type. There is an initial cost of 25 Euro for application of account type conversion plus there could be additional cost per awarded entry in cases in which nomination fees would be higher for the new account type (for example when converting from Professional to Enterprise Account). Furthermore, you will be required toı pay the difference in fees. Before ordering this service please contact support and get more details on real costs or check this page to calculate the final fees yourself. We would like to remind you that the account type conversion can be made from your control panel if you did not win or nominate a work yet.

* Important note about Account and Profile Services, if you have A' Design Award credits, you can use these credits to order these services, to do so, please contact support first.

Do it for Me
The A' Design Award & Competitions' control panel is designed in a way to make all functions, tools and aspects of the competition accessible in digital format or interface from one single page. Anything that could be required could potentially be done from the control panel. For example, invoices can be downloaded from download invoices section, certificates can be downloaded from certificates page, yearbook previews, exhibition cards, gala-entry tickets and gala invitations can all be accessed from their pages that you can access from control panel. However if you do not wish to click the buttons yourself, we can help you for that, however each time such a request is made by you (such as an email, phone or any contact request for anything that could potentially be done by yourself but instead asked from us), we will deduct a small fee from your account. While the fee is small, it helps us keep the requests in a manageable amount, the small fee was brought as a result of many participants simply contacting us before trying to download or access the relevant functionality from their control panels, initially the amount was not high so we used to comply with each and every request, however after a while, it happened that several dedicated staff would be required simply to click buttons and perform mundane and irrelevant operations on behalf of participants, such as “download that for me”, “send this to me as an email”, “please update my information”, “please replace my image as attached” etc. In the end we observed and agreed that instead of providing dedicated staff for clicking buttons for others, we would simply ask a small fee, which we hope would result the winners or participants to use the free functionality themselves in a free manner, and doing so, providing us the ability to allocate dedicated staff for PR and publicity of the winner works instead. You do not have to order this service, we will deduct the relevant fee for each requests.

* Important note about Do it for Me Services: All of these can be done by you for free of charge from your control panel, we suggest that you do these yourself instead of requesting the service from us.

Express Preliminary Score Service
Once you upload your design, it could take up to a week to get a preliminary score, but in most cases, we try to provide a score within the same day if not, within 2 or 3 days. However if you are in rush, you could order Express Preliminary Score Service to get a preliminary score assigned to your design within 24 hours. Please kindly note that this service is not the same with Express Judging Service, and please also be reminded that the Preliminary Score Service is actually free if you would be patient to wait the score. This is an urgent preliminary score service and you will learn your preliminary score faster if you order the service. We once again remind you that the preliminary score service is free of charge but it could take a few days to get your score assigned.

* Important note about Express Preliminary Score Service, it is not Express Judging Service and we remind for the third time that preliminary check services are actually free if you wait for them a few days.

Extraordinary Request
Extraordinary Requests are unique things or services you would need from A’ Design Award. We classify and create a pricing for them based on (T) time man-hours or processing power, (R) resources and costs, including but not limited to costs of production as well as opportunity costs, as well as (E) difficulty or expertise and experience required to prepare or respond to such requests. The fee (F) calculation for extraordinary request is calculated based on the following formula: Fee (F) = 1.25 (( T x Z(E) ) + R ). Here, T is the minimum man-hours required, all tasks would be considered to take at least 1 hour, this is justified by the fact that while the task could take several minutes, switching tasks, and following through, rechecking etc could actually make the task longer than it actually is. Z(E) is a multiplier array and the following array is used for different difficulty levels or expertise required for the task Z(E) = (1: Basic/Simple = 10, 2: Limited/Easy = 20, 3: Intermediate/Normal = 50, 4: Advanced/Hard = 100, 5: Expert/Difficult = 200, 6: Unique/Very Difficult = 500) where Basic/Simple are the tasks that do not require much thought or experience; i.e. those type of tasks could be completed by any employee, and Expert/Difficult are tasks require a competent and proficient high level staff member to be able to complete it. Furthermore, the R is the cost, which also includes opportunity costs; i.e. when taking care of your extraordinary request the staff member will probably not be able to take care of other equally important requests or perform services, thus the opportunity cost as well as costs of taking care of the task including material costs shall be included, furthermore it should also include any overheads or other costs and minimum R is 10 €. We do not limit the Extraordinary Requests to any specific domain, as long as they are ethical and relevant. We are happy to give you a price quote for a specific request upon demand. Below we provide some examples of calculation of fees, but for each case the fees could be different. Please contact support so that we could calculate the request fee and provide you the service you needed but we did not previously offered. Services are not available immediately and there will be no refunds about them at any point, their booking must also be made in advance in many cases. If there is an equivalent other service noted in the fees section, the service with the highest fee shall be ordered.

* Some of the services requries you to fulfill several criteria; for example before you could order Formal Invitation service, you need to; 1) be a laureate of the professional edition 2) confirm attending gala from your control panel 3) book your hotel and plane tickets. If you order a service that we cannot provide; then we will add the amount to your account at A' Design Award instead of refunding it, therefore it is a good idea to consult support before ordering any bespoke services and to check their availability first.

On-Site Voting in a Remote Secure Facility Service
For projects where government, institutional or commercial confidentiality is paramount, and unauthorized disclosure could harm your interests or security, we offer the On-Site Voting in a Remote Secure Facility Service. This premium option allows a select group of jurors to evaluate your design at a secure location chosen by you. Votes are recorded manually, ensuring no digital footprint of your sensitive information. This method provides an exceptional level of security, effectively minimizing digital exposure and making it highly resistant to unauthorized access, including potential state-level interventions. Under this service, we only maintain essential project information like Project Name, Primary Function, and Category Details, thereby ensuring utmost confidentiality. To remind you, when you join A' Design Award, you can take part via Concealed Categories. Concealed Categories are reserved for designs with patent-pending elements, trade secrets, sensitive or confidential projects requiring heightened privacy, works bound by client confidentiality agreements, or those unable to be published due to intellectual property license restrictions. While A' Design Award diligently safeguards the confidentiality of Concealed Category entries, it is important to acknowledge certain realities. Jurors, who are bound by non-disclosure agreements, will review these entries. Although extremely rare, there is a minute possibility of information leaks. Moreover, sophisticated cyber threats or state-level interventions might pose risks to data security. Additionally, in specific scenarios where it is legally mandated or necessary to protect broader interests, data might be disclosed to law enforcement or relevant third parties. We strive for the highest standards of privacy and security, but we also believe in transparently communicating the full scope of potential risks, however small, to our participants. Do not submit state secrets or government projects that are classified as Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret by your government except in case if you request On-Site Voting in a Remote Secure Facility Service and provide us with eight jury members who have required government clearances and necessary professional background and skill to evaluate the entries - i.e. for On-Site Voting in a Remote Secure Facility Service, we do not provide our own jurors as part of the service to protect our jurors, as well as to fully protect and fully minimize your risk, however you will be signing an affidavit and make a legally binding declaration that you will assign to this process your highest qualified jurors, preferably from another government department who did not work on the project, who will also agree to be bound by our juror's agreement and vote entries fairly, for highest level of protection, we will not save or store the names of the eight-member jury panel either, ensuring that there is no information leak possible, that being said we will keep jury evaluation notes and scoring papers, which will be provided to you by the A' Design Awards together with jury agreement, affidavit, evaluation methodology and guidelines that needs to be followed during voting.

Comprehensive Data and Digital Footprint Removal Service
Following jury evaluation, you can opt for our Comprehensive Data and Digital Footprint Removal Service. This service is designed to provide an additional layer of security by thoroughly removing all digital and physical materials you had submitted to us related to your entry - including images, documents, and videos. This is not going to completely remove the work, we will keep 3 elements; Project Name, Project Function and Award Status, however everything else will be deleted. To enhance protection, we not only delete the digital backups but also eliminate any physical copies, such as printed licenses or declaration documents you may have submitted. By choosing this service, you effectively reduce risks by erasing the digital and paper trail of your submission. Rest assured, opting for the Comprehensive Data and Digital Footprint Removal Service will not affect your award level or status; your recognition and achievements remain intact. Furthermore just to remind you that Comprehensive Data and Digital Footprint Removal Service does not remove your invoice or other legal records that we have to keep as required by law.

Share My Story Credits
A’ Design Award & Competition provides free Share My Story Credits based on achievements as described in Follow Me @ Social page, however if you need additional Story Credits you may purchase them here. It is our duty to note that pricewise it might make more sense to purchase nomination tickets if you have already a good design, however in any case if you need urgent Story Credits please find the following table useful:

* It is important to remember and note that each Share My Story service costs Three (3) Credits. Credits you purchase here will be added to your Story Credits account balance.

License Addendum Service
A’ Design Award & Competition requires duly signed License confirmations for all Content you provide with to A’ Design Awards. Our License provides us with maximum usage and exploitation rights in respect to your designs, while we would vocally and non-officially and in a non-binding way hope to promise to never to use your Content in a way that truly exploits it, in our Terms and Agreements, we say exactly the opposite; in our official language, and in legal declaration we explicitly say we will exploit your content, now this usually is not a problem as we would be very less likely to do so, but it could be a problem for very large brands, enterprises and institutions that might have a lot to worry for, and for this case, we allow Enterprises and Consortium account type owners to propose License Addendums a nominal fee, and for Agency, Partnership, Cooperation, Alliance or Agency account types, we provide an opportunity to make Addendums with a surcharge, and for all other accounts we honestly think it is not making sense yet we still allow such Addendums with a supercharge. Please kindly note that even if you pay the License Addendum Fees, it does not mean we would accept your Addendum, we will however read and consider it. Your License Addendum will be considered by the legal department and we might need to consult to further advocates or intellectual property consultants. If you have multiple designs, and for each design the same or similar Addendums, we provide a discount also noted below, but that discount applies to your second Addendum, so you would first pay License Addendum Fee first, and then pay the Duplicate Review if the License Addendum has exactly the same terms and conditions of your original License Addendum, otherwise if it has different terms you should pay the regular service fee. Depending on your Addendum, we might still need to move your work to a Concealed Category, if your Addendum does not permit us to for example share your work with third parties such as press partners or include your work in compilations such as in press kits send to press members or if you do not allow us to publish your work in a book or similar. In the end, we will review your additional terms and clarifications and send you back, scanned versions of Accepted and Approved Addendum or Rejected Addendum. We will further inform you why we did not reject your Addendum, if only we rejected it at the first place. If you are a fortune 500 brand, we might also allow you to provide us with an Intellectual Property Affidavit and Copyright Declaration instead of standard License, only if you are forced to do so by your legal department, otherwise we prefer the standard license, as this allows us to promote your work as much as possible in any medium.

Bespoke License and Declaration
Instead of filling and uploading our version of the License, providing with License Addendum or providing us our affidavit, you can also provide us with your own version of the License (Bespoke License) in which you give us a royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, unlimited (or limited*), non-exclusive, transferable, fully sublicensable and worldwide license to (C.1) use your images online and offline, at any media, at any time, but most importantly as part of printed or digital books, posters, infographics, advertisements, flyers, online or physical exhibitions, digital compilations, electronic press kits, physical press kits, at online showcases, part of press articles, part of press releases, to post in social networks, to promote in television, to promote in radio, to post and publish at online video networks and other channels, to include in interactive exhibitions, stand alone or together with other works, to promote your work, to promote the A’ Design Award, to promote good design and create a global appreciation for good design (towards our vision), as well as enabling A’ Design Award to earn money from the sales of books, sales of access to electronic media, posters and other material in which your design images, brand name and textual description are featured or presented, as well as enabling us to earn revenue from merchandise, exhibition, cultural activity or event ticket sales; (merchandise for example if we publish design annuals where some of your images could be featured as design of the day, inside the annual to be sold in design museums or other outlets), as well as earning advertising income for example if we publish your design images or text in some of our websites (or press partner’s websites) where your designs are presented together with ads (this is indeed required for press members; i.e. press members should be able to exploit your design in a way to publish them at their websites but then the press members could earn revenue from advertising or by selling access to their publications, this revenue would not be given to, or you would not get a cut from the sales of media publications; but this act constitutes as exploitation in legal sense and therefore you must address this in your license), likewise if your design images get published in some online video channels or television such entities could earn revenues doing so but you must give us license to give to them to publish your images without them being forced to pay you, with the condition that where we are able to alter your images and text (including but not limited to scaling your images up, cropping them, rotating them, change their colours such as for improving images for printing, or combining your work with other images such as overlaying award winner logo on your images which creates value for you, fixing typos in your text) and without attribution (for example sometimes we place images as thumbnails and therefore we cannot always provide attribution, and sometimes press members will provide attribution inside article but not on image, sometimes in small exhibition flyers and invitations there is no space to provide attribution, sometimes image will be in a video and attribution will not be in video but perhaps in video description). (C.2) you declare that you are the original creator and/or have all the legal rights to the works and have all necessary rights to provide us with this license. (C.3) you warrant, represent and guarantee us that if we get contacted, sued or disputed by third parties in regards to your images, you will protect, defend, hold harmless and indemnify us and cover any and all costs, damages, fees, fines as well as our time-loss arising from such disputes and litigation process, for this stipulation we would be pleased if you could use the language as noted in our license because we do not want to get any trouble promoting your works and we want to know that with complete certainty you will protect and defend us. (C.4) When promoting your work, we should be able to tell to everyone that this work is yours, using your brand name or logo as needed (if included in your design presentation), please also have these provisions noted, you need to provide us with a wide set of rights, listing as many scenarios as possible that ensures we would be able to use your name without getting sued neither by you nor third parties; we for sure do not wish to create new products with your intellectual property or to compete with you, or to use your logo or images for indecent purposes, you may note all such conditions without reservation. (C.5) In summary you should present us with a good license, that covers a wide array of scenarios to enable us to promote your work (and A’ Design Award) without limitation, at as many different type of media as possible, and to use your images legally. In general, we need your license especially to promote your work, and in very rare cases to include them in books that are sold, which would lead us to potentially earn money, which is considered exploitation and use in legal context, but as you imagine these are all stipulations that make sense, and hope you could provide us with the legal framework required for us to be able to use your content. The alternative to all this is that if you do not provide us with our License, an affidavit or the Bespoke License, than we can simply move your design to Concealed Category; when your design is moved to a Concealed Category, you do not lose your award status; you can still use the award status and logo, still are eligible to get the award trophy, still eligible to join gala (if you are pro edition entrant) but we would not publish your design. Indeed many companies pay us to move their design to Concealed Category, as this has many benefits including but not limited to cases when companies are applying for patents and publishing their designs would void such applications, as well as cases where companies present trade secrets in their submissions to better explain their designs but not wish these secrets to be known. Concealed Categories are as prestigious as main categories and apart from non-publishing results, the laurates retain access to other award benefits such as the eligibility to obtain trophy, to use award winner logo, to use award winner certificate, to obtain yearbook (but of course without your design included as it is concealed), to join gala, and others, and works in Concealed Categories count equally towards World Design Rankings, Designer Rankings and Design Classification Ranking systems. To order Bespoke License/Declaration Review, please order one of the services below:

NOTES, In regards to Bespoke Licenses: (C.1) It is important to remind you that your license must always be royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, unlimited (or limited* but with a wide array of applications), non-exclusive, transferable, fully sublicensable and worldwide license; it should be royalty-free (we or our press members should not be later obliged to pay you or third parties to promote your work), irrevocable (you cannot cancel your license later, we should be at ease of mind knowing we can promote your work at any time), perpetual (your license shall last forever, we cannot send your works to press members if the license is not perpetual; press members always reject such proposals on the condition that they do not want to bother with taking down images after a certain date), unlimited (we noted as unlimited here because we use the images in a wide array of media and for many different purposes but you can actually provide us with a limited license where you provide us with a large list of possibilities that allows us to use images especially for promoting you, to send to press members, to have in exhibitions, to publish online, to include in press kits, to include in posters, to include in flyers, to include in competition promotional materials, to post in social networks, to promote in television, online video networks and other channels and similar, if you do not provide us with an unlimited license, you must provide us with a very long detailed list of all the things we can do, as we will be limited by what we can do with your work, we will each time have to read your license before we promote your design in a new media, or new and innovative manner or include your work as part of a new original promotion campaign, in this regards it is true that we might of course also ask you to extend your license and request permission for new media and new ways of promoting your work but this is very time-consuming and limiting to us as you would understand, regardless we wish to make sure we do not create a risk for your institution with our license, so we will accept limited licenses if you could please list all possible ways we could promote your design images), non-exclusive (you can give rights to as many other parties as you desire), transferable (we should be able to transfer this license to third parties), fully sublicensable (we should be able to empower press members and other third parties such as public relations companies and PR agents as well as affiliate promoters to use your content to promote your work) and worldwide (these terms should apply to all countries and geographical regions) license.

Trusted Brand Status
Under normal conditions, for each award winning work, we would kindly oblige you to provide us with a special License, that allows us to use your Content that you have provided to A’ Design Awards freely. However, if you are a very large and established brand, and if you are having a tough time to get our License signed by your legal department, you may instead apply for having a Trusted Brand Status. If you are granted a Trusted Brand Status, you will no longer be required to provide a distinct license for each and every one of your award-winning works. Trusted Brand Status applications are individually reviewed based on number of award-winning works, past success, number of years of participation, and intellectual property dispute history among other factors. Before you apply for Trusted Brand Status please ensure that you have one of: Enterprise, Consortium, Cooperation, Alliance, Government, Media, Conglomerate or Agency account with at least 10 award-winning works. Trusted Brand Status application is free of charge. When you contact our support please provide your profile ID as well as the reasons why you wish to obtain a Trusted Brand Status, your feedback is important for us to address any concerns in future as well as to build a platform that respects the interests of benign entities that make positive impact in the World through their good design. Please kindly note that Trusted Brand Status does not supersedes a License, if possible we would also require the License from your account, as the License is the only document that truly enables us to advertise and promote your work as much as possible without getting worried, any other mechanism, including any bypass via Trusted Brand Status or Administrative Overwrite simply cripples us, and furthermore incurs us additional costs for each time we would wish to promote your work in some new way or format or event we would have to get in touch with you, this is hard thing to do provided we have thousands of winners every year, so to the extend possible we wish you to provide us with the License. Again we wish to remind you that if your brand has a social media presence, if you are uploading your design images to any social network, or online platform you are already providing a similar License to other third-parties, we wish to have such License so that we could freely promote your work without being worried, we want to have paper trail, proof and documents to quickly respond to intellectual property disputes as well as we wish to be empowered and given rights to promote your work easily; we want to have license to upload your works to marketing platforms to share with press members alike.

Private Publicist Service
Typically, upon winning the A' Design Award, you will receive a significant number of emails designed to guide you on how to exploit, benefit from, and use our services and tools to your advantage. We are aware, however, that this might seem overwhelming for some of our laureates. For this reason, we offer the option to request our on-demand Publicist Service. There are no contractual obligations to request this highly optional service, and the fee, which changes each year, is communicated via email. You may choose to request it only if you deem it beneficial to your needs. Learn about Private Publicist Service.

Press Release Retraction and Review Services
Retracting a press release after it has been distributed entails various administrative, operational, and reputational challenges. The costs associated with a retraction arise from the need to manually update and communicate with numerous online and offline platforms, the potential negative impacts on our SEO efforts, the time and resources spent reaching out to publications, and the implications for our brand's prestige and credibility. The costs of retraction vary based on the extent and depth of the distribution service initially chosen. Detailed explanations for each service level are provided below, and a comprehensive cost structure can be found in the table that follows: