International Design Exhibition

This page explains how to get involved with organization of our International Design Exhibitions.

What is it?
International A’ Design Award Exhibitions are where we take the A’ Design Award winner-designs exhibition to Cities and Countries across the globe to showcase original and good design works. A’ Design Award Exhibitions create socio-economic and cultural value and contribute to public recognition, prestige and acknowledgement of hosting locations. This is different from our thematic 40 x 40 Exhibitions and is different from our Design Exhibition in Italy and different from the Museum of Design Online Exhibition.

We have organized international design exhibitions many times already and hosting institutions and locations till today have been; governments, national museums, trenched and established art galleries, design-oriented large brands, trade shows, ministry of arts, ministry of culture, ministry of economics, government-level economic development initiatives, culture department of cities, cities themselves, design faculties, architecture faculties and universities themselves.

If you know anybody that is working in at least one of the following; government, universities, ministries, city management, trade shows, big manufacturing companies, brands and large enterprises; such as majors, politicians, ministers, high-level bureaucrats, CEOs and managers, you can help us organize the A’ Design Award Exhibition in your City and Country. Indeed, it is actually very easy to do this as we will support you all the way.

By helping us organize an international design exhibition in your city and country, you will be able enjoy special direct and indirect benefits as we note below.

What do you get? Your Special Benefits.
Helping us organize the A’ Design Award exhibition have the following direct benefits based on the level of support provided by the hosting organization: (A) Level 1: 3 Professional Nomination Tickets. Level 2 : 5 Professional Nomination Tickets Valid for Any Account Type + 1 Express Judging Service. Level 3: 10 Professional Nomination Tickets Valid for Any Account Type + 2 Express Judging Service. Level 4: 15 Professional Nomination Tickets Valid for Any Account Type + 3 Express Judging Service. Level 5: 20 Professional Nomination Tickets Valid for Any Account Type + 4 Express Judging Service. (B) For all levels 1 to 5, you will also be given an option to help for the curation of designs as well as have opportunity to allocate space exclusive to yourself or your network (however all works exhibited must be winner of A’ Design Award). These are all of course direct benefits in addition to our gratitude and the externalities you would receive.

Helping us organize the A’ Design Award exhibition have the following externalities and indirect benefits: You position yourself as a leading figure in design in your City and Country as organizer of a prestigious design exhibition. For academics, this exhibition organization is curation and helps and contributes to your academic advancement. For all others, the exhibition organization helps you connect with local press and media in an organic way, giving you opportunity to pitch and promote your works; you will have access to potential new press contacts as shared by hosting institutions and you will have opportunity to meet new design oriented audiences. Furthermore, using the tickets you can submit many more works, or you can give tickets to your network as you see fit.

Levels of Support are as follows: Level 1: Space Allocation Only. Level 2: Space Allocation, Poster Printing and Support in Exhibition Set-up. Level 3: Space Allocation, Poster Printing and Support in Exhibition Set-up.  Sponsorship and or support for logistics such as transportation of works or hosting A’ Design Award Delegation by providing accommodation and by covering travel expenses. Level 4: Space Allocation, Poster Printing and Support in Exhibition Set-up. Sponsorship and support for logistics. Hosting A’ Design Award Delegation, covering accommodation and travel expenses. Level 5. Everything in Level 4, plus providing a special significant additional budget to promote and publicize the event in local media as well as in international media.

How do you do it?
If you are shy and do not wish to call or meet anyone: We have prepared several documents and materials as well as a special Exhibition Pitch System to help you. First of all, at the most basic level, you can actually spend 3 minutes of your time right now to start this. We have a system called Exhibition Pitch to automate this process. Using our Exhibition Pitch System is easy. All you need to do is to provide contact details of related institutions and organizations and we will contact them ourselves. We will do all the heavy lifting from there on, send them materials, books and merchandise as well as a Letter of Intent, and you will ripe the benefits if our pitch turns into a collaboration.

But we know you can do a better job by having a lunch or dinner, or even in an elevator pitch, or simply by making an appointment and meeting the right people at their office. All you need to do is to let the relevant people know that (1) A’ Design Award, one of the World’s largest and most influential design accolade is interested in organizing an exhibition in their venue. (2) This exhibition would create socio-economic and cultural value for hosting institution as well as positively contribute to brand value and global recognition. (3) You have the contacts, and all you need is to sort out some little details such as amount of space allocated, timelines, and level of cooperation they desire. That’s it. They will most likely ask for a formal presentation, which we will help you by providing with you an official presentation letter template, as well as whatever you need such as books, merchandise etc for your next meeting. Furthermore, the Letter of Intent could be useful for you as it lists value propositions for venues who allocate us space.

If you do not know anyone but feel you could reach the people by contacting them via regular mail, post or electronic mail, we got you covered as well. We have prepared an official presentation template that you can download, modify and use for your pitch. We are also ready to send you additional yearbooks, merchandise and content that you can use to pitch and impress the authorities and relevant people, you can contact our support and ask for such documents delivered to you. Finding contacts, in case you do not have them ready, is also very easy for you; all you need to do is to check websites of ; governments, national museums, trenched and established art galleries, design-oriented large brands, design related trade shows, ministry of arts, ministry of culture, ministry of economics, government-level economic development initiatives, culture department of cities, cities themselves, design faculties, architecture faculties and universities themselves in your own language; it is easier for you to find these local contacts and get in touch with them.

Proceeding Further
1. Download or Letter of Intent – This will give you an idea of what we want to do. It is better to read this and translate this to your language; it contains talking points and pitching points and value proposals that we offer and seek. This document is available for our winners only, if you are not a laurate please contact support.
2. Download our Long Form Letter – This is a more formal, detailed presentation of what we are looking for and what we are offering in return to hosting institutions, in a more formal way, it is better to translate this to your language. This document is available for our winners only, if you are not a laurate but wish to help us, please contact support.
3. Exhibition Pitch System – This is an online form that you fill, once you fill it two things happen: (a) We send an email to the institutions. (b) We send them our yearbooks, merchandise and Letter of Intend as well as Long Form Letter, in a hope to convince them. Use this only if you do not have personal contacts; if you have personal contacts, ignore this; it is best to directly talk or contact yourself. This system is available for our winners only, make sure you are logged-in.

How To Organize an International Design Exhibition

Organizing a good design exhibition in your country or city is easy. A’ Design Award will be providing you with everything you need; that is visuals, communication materials, publicity templates digital presentations and exhibition posters for your international design exhibitions.

In general, we would ask you to curate the exhibition as we think this would be fair, however in order not to overwhelm you, with your request we are pleased to help you pre-curating the design exhibition posters by selecting and providing you first Platinum and Gold award-winning works in all categories in current year, plus Silver, Bronze and Iron award-winning works in categories that you may be interested in.

You do not need to print all of the posters. You may have a digital display to showcase works that are not physically exhibited. If you need more works for any given category, we could provide more designs, not just from the current design award year, but also from previous years at your request.

Size of the exhibition venue is not important, we can provide you with tens of thousands of works as well as a few hundred designs, to meet your needs.

First, we would send you the design exhibition poster images as digital files. It is almost always to print the posters at their destination city as transportation of posters could easily cost more than printing costs.

The design exhibition poster image files are usually 72 DPI PNG files without compression, while 72 DPI may seem low, the pixel size is very high, and thus this will not create issues in printing; you may scratch to print in size keeping proportions, in general the poster files are 50 cm x 70 cm size (when Image Resolution is set to 150 DPI – Dots per Inch).

We recommend you to first print 50 cm x 70 cm size version of a single poster to see how it is; you may scale them down proportionately if it is absolutely required. While you may scale them to min A3+ size but we do not recommend scaling down as the posters should preferably be 50 cm x 70 cm in size.

The design exhibition posters will have a digital passepartout (black borders) and you may decide to remove the black borders if you wish to save toner or if you would like to keep the presentation cleaner. You may also consider extending the passepartout if you wish to ensure borderless printing or if you have to cut the prints afterwards.

Before printing, you can ask us to make any such modifications to posters and we will process the images for you, however if you need to make urgent changes or modifications then we recommend using Irfanview, a freeware software.

Black border removal, DPI setting update, and any sort of image file exports could be completely automated via batch process; Irfanview is a very handy tool that you could also use to convert file types and perform other operations, we highly recommend downloading Irfanview just to have it in your arsenal. Irfanview also allows you to add more borders in batch mode, in case for borderless printing, you may need to extend the borders.

Once you have the first print and like how it feels, we recommend you to calculate how many posters you would need; in general, you may want to have two rows of posters to have higher density. We could help you with poster placement and exhibition design if you need.

Furthermore, you would need a clean white background or clean black background wooden boards to hang the posters. You can of course use any solution that looks elegant but the backgrounds must be either black, white, light gray or transparent and should not be any other colour, except for natural wood, concrete or bricks. If the walls of the exhibition space are in different colour, but the posters look good when hanged, we generally accept this regardless of the colour choice, however if you will procure new hanging materials, white is recommended.

You can hang the posters to the wall, to the ceiling, to wooden panels as you see fit. Hanging posters could take significant time, and would require at least two persons working in tandem, a third person is recommended to check if posters are on level, for a single team. In general, having two teams is recommended.

If you print posters on PVC foamboards, you do not need a frame, however if you print posters on paper, we recommend having 50 x 70 cm frames. Ikea’s 50 x 70 frames, would generally fit well and would be economically feasible solutions.

If you have wooden exhibitors or display totems, available, you should let us know, we would be pleased to send or bring some physical items in addition to design posters to your international design exhibition but we would need to plan this in advance.

If you can have a digital display that is 65” or bigger in size, we would be pleased to send horizontal 4K resolution posters, so we could showcase all winners in rotation as well, this will create additional value. In general the digital posters look great on 75" screens.

In summary; the A’ Design Awards will prepare and send you design exhibition posters ready to print in your Country or City. A’ Design Awards will also prepare and send you digital screen presentations. Furthermore, A’ Design Awards will also help you curate the physical items and bring you physical items from the permanent collection of our design museum. If you are thinking about organizing a design exhibition, contact us and we will help you.

Creating Publicity, Finding Sponsors and Attracting Visitors
Before you design your publicity campaign or advertisement to attract visitors and spend any money at all, you must first reiterate and focus your goals; what do you wish to achieve with your international design exhibition of the A' Design Award winners, and how our design exhibition could benefit you directly; the international design exhibition of the A' Design Award winners that you are organizing is an excellent excuse to reach and meet with new people as well as strengthen your bonds with your existing contacts; you may and should use the international design exhibition to reach out to people who could help you achieve your goals.

Once you clarify and note your primary goal, the first thing you would want to do is to define your target audience and make a list of types of contacts you want to invite. In general, it is always a good idea to focus on your primary goal yet also to have a secondary objective as audience growth. The audience you are targeting, the list of people you wish to engage are going to be consisting of your existing contacts as well as new referrals, clients, customers and consumers that may be of value if you had time to connect them or reach them.

Primary goals could be "find new clients", "get more press contacts", "make friends with affluent audiences", "form new connections with company owners" and similar. The audience are people who you want to know about the event, and your name; even if these people or entities would not attend the event, reaching out to them will create significant value; and up to twelve months from the event, your invitees should be able to remember your name and your business and should be able to consider you when taking decisions, after a year of event organization, you may need to refresh their memory as such repeating the events is of importance to occupy a piece of the minds of your target audiences.

Once you clarify your goal and audience, simply brainstorm where your target audience converge; the answer would be mostly associations, clubs, member lists, institutions or organizations, but also you may target specific points such as readers of certain publications, attendees of a certain event, consumers of a specific service, customers of a specific business and similar.

Once you know where you find the people, you should devise a strategy to capture their contacts. In some cases, if you collaborate with local PR agencies, venues or art galleries, they may help you with their contact list; even if they may not outright provide you with their contact lists they may agree to send invitations on your behalf, likewise media members may send newsletters on your behalf to their audiences, it is of course important to choose publications or sending communications to contact lists aligned with your goals, and your audiences.

In general, the quality of people is more important than the quantity of people; it is better to have more relevant people than to have a lot of people; this would also give you the opportunity to have more time to spend with each valued guest and would help you more to accomplish your goals, unless your goal is to have images, photos or videos of the venue full of people, which is a valid goal; many organizers would use the design exhibition to attract new people, potential customers to their venue.

Once you have the goals set, the audience clearly identified, contact lists are made or contact methods are selected, you should design the invitation as well as a poster, with date and venue of the design exhibition noted. If you prepare a poster, it is generally good to note names of exhibited designers within the poster. A' Design Award can help you prepare the poster, invitations, and we will also create a certificate for each exhibited work on behalf of you. In any step of the process, you may contact the A' Design Award, and we will help you.

Exhibition Displays and Pedestals
If you wish to exhibit physical items, prototypes, models or products you would need exhibition displays and pedestals, sometimes called exhibition plinths, display counters, exhibition podiums or retail displays. These are easy to procure as well as to produce. In general, you would need white cubes made of wood. Normally art galleries, trade show organizers and trade fair exhibition design and setup companies would already have these in their warehouses. Trade fair setup and exhibition companies can rent these displays for short time periods. Retail interior design companies would also know where to procure them as these are commonly used in shops to display items, exhibition displays may also be ordered online.

Most common sizes for displays are as follows: For small objects: 40 cm (w) x 40 cm (d) x 120 cm (h), for long objects: 100 cm (w) x 50 cm (d) x 100 cm (h) and for large objects: 100 cm (w) x 100 cm (d) x 50 cm (h).

Thank You
Finally, thank you very much for your help. In the end, we prepared this page as we are trying to organize many more design exhibitions worldwide, and we know co-organizing with our laureates create value for our winners as much as it creates value for the laureate themselves. We hope we could organize an exhibition together, that creates value to yourself and to all A’ Design Award winners.

Ready to Organize?
Do not overthink it and simply contact us today and we will help you with everything, A' Design Awards will answer all your questions and provide you support during organization and publicity of your design exhibition.