An award is not a verdict: the juror’s gaze

I’ve been a juror at the Pentawards for two years now. I’d sat on design juries before, but this was the first to ask jurors to deliver structured feedback, justifying every score for every entry. In the first year, the format mostly slowed me down. This second year, I started to notice something different – something the writing was doing to me, not just to the participants who would later receive it.

Written feedback demands a kind of articulation that scoring alone never asks for. It lays my preferences out in plain text, in my own voice, with my name underneath. It makes me spend more time with each project. And it keeps making me think about the other side of the table: if this paragraph were about my work, would I learn something from it? Would I want to receive it?

Those questions led me to another, one I have been returning to ever since I started entering my own work into awards.

What are design awards actually for?

The question is not new. Most of the debate revolves, understandably, around whether the system is fair to those who enter (and to those who don’t). Whether the criteria are biased, whether the panels are diverse, whether the winners are representative.

But what every designer who has served on a jury knows to be true (even if they don’t always admit it) is a basic truth that sits underneath those questions: there is no shared, precise definition of what good design is.

Not because quality doesn’t exist – it does, and it’s multifaceted. But each gaze illuminates different facets of it. Each juror, like each creative director, carries a particular history, a particular set of references, a particular tolerance for risk.

What we call a premiável project – an award-worthy one – is the outcome of a specific constellation of jurors converging, under that brief, on a specific reading. A different panel produces a different outcome. The same project, judged twice, can land in two different places.

This doesn’t mean that gaze has no value. It’s contemporary and rooted in practice. The people in that room are people whose own work the discipline already takes seriously.

Historically, that is what an award does above all: it records a reading, made by a group that has earned the right to look. Which is also why assembling a jury is probably the most consequential work in organising an award – something I felt first-hand when I helped build the jury and the judging process for the 14th Brazilian Design Biennial.

Who is in the room shapes much of what follows. But a gaze is still a gaze. It’s partial, framed by who walked in that week and, just as much, by who chose to enter that year (and who didn’t).

From verdict to collective gaze

If we treat the result purely as a definitive verdict on quality, the participant who didn’t win is left in a loop of ‘Was it fair? Am I being undervalued? Is that other piece really better than mine?’

In my experience on both sides of the chair, that is the loop that exhausts most people. The shift I am trying to make this year is simple: an award is not a verdict; it’s a collective gaze.

Accept that and the question changes. It becomes less about was it fair and more about what did that gaze see and what can I do with it?

That second question, however, can only be answered if the gaze is made visible. And a lot is moving in that direction. More and more awards have been introducing written rationales, structured criteria and conversations after the results. It’s a welcome change.

Three questions, a hundred entries

So, in that spirit, here are a few impressions of what I have seen so far – bearing in mind that Round Two hasn’t started yet and, for now, the scores have produced a shortlist. I make no claim to being comprehensive or precise; I simply want to share what did and didn’t catch my gaze. Essentially, I asked myself three questions again and again, across more than a hundred entries.

Has craft stopped being a differentiator?

In a striking number of submissions, the typography is chosen with intention, the hierarchy is well resolved, the system unfolds consistently across the whole range, the product representation is coherent, and the presentation is impeccable. Two-thirds of any category looks, at a glance, equally competent. What used to be standout craft is now category baseline. The bar moved fast – which is tricky in packaging, where the strongest move you can make is often a small one, especially with big brands.

Are challenger codes still challenging?

Several visual vocabularies that a few years ago shouted ‘challenger brand’ are now common ground: the collection of beautiful textures or illustrations to tell variants apart, the generative gradient blob, Art Deco fluting as automatic premium, the illustrated regional postcard as a shortcut to authenticity, the hard-light photography with an analogue-camera feel, the prescriptive pharma-style typographic look borrowed to make any other category feel luxurious.

Mastering these codes no longer makes work distinctive. They still work commercially, but after meeting them so many times, they have stopped working competitively. Where is the next language going to come from?

Does the idea survive without its styling?

This became my most useful filter question. Imagine the project stripped of the window dressing of polished mock-ups, whether real or AI-generated. Does the proposition still stand? In the projects that kept pulling me back, it did. In a finish that carries more brand than the label itself, in a pack architecture doing the work the logo used to do, in a structural device that becomes the system’s primary graphic asset. Most submissions can’t pass this test. The ones that did made me look closer.

Making the gaze visible

The truth is that, with each jury, I gain a little more clarity about my own gaze and about my role as a juror. If awards are subjective by nature, the most honest thing I can do is bring that subjectivity into open conversation, rather than leave it hidden inside the verdict – and, in doing so, share a little of the vulnerable position entrants put themselves in when they submit their work.

This naturally happens on the rare occasions when a jury is in the same room. That is where the real learning happens: when you open your own gaze and access the diversity of everyone else’s perspectives. It’s why most of us accept the invitation to do this work, which is almost always voluntary. But all of it still happens behind closed doors.

Now imagine if that collective gaze and the discussion it generates became accessible not only to the jury, but to everyone.

Finally, if admitting that an award is not a verdict helps entrants ask the right questions, then it falls to those who judge to name what is at stake, beyond the glamour.

Judging is one of the easiest things there is (not just in our profession, but in human nature), and every project looks improvable when having an opinion carries no risk – which says a lot about the expectations we load onto an award entry.

However great a juror’s exercise in empathy, only the one who held the pen knows the road.