Participating in design contests

[chrisild]

You will surely learn to appreciate Frizio's designs by looking at what a German dealer is currently selling.

(Link does not work any more; removed.)

Christian

[Figleaf]

Indeed, I've come to appreciate Frizio as someone who does a really good job, as opposed to this sort of abomination designed only to get money out of pockets quickly and let the buyers suffer the loss.

It must be tough to break into the circle of known designers. EU rules say you can't discriminate between people of different EU countries, yet, somehow, Austrian coins are still designed b Austrians, Dutch coins by Dutchmen etc. Frizio ought to have an equal chance to win assignments.

Peter

[annovi.frizio]

very nices.. thank you for all.. :-)

[chrisild]

I've come to appreciate Frizio as someone who does a really good job

Agreed. I also like the way he presents his design "in public" (like here), discusses them with others, makes new/improved designs based on those discussions ...

Problem with coin designs being "national" is, in many countries the mints have their own (employed) designers. In others it is done a little differently, but in Germany for example you have to be in the BBR list of artists in order to be invited to design competitions. And even if there is an open competition, there is the question of how you know/learn about it.

Then there are certain other formal issues, from different languages to technical conditions (many competitions require artists to make large plaster models of their designs). But there is hope - the Austrian Helmut Zobl for example has participated in several German design competitions, and the originally Czech (German since the early 90s) Frantisek Chochola has designed various German commems as well as the euro circulation coins from San Marino.

Christian

[annovi.frizio]

BBR list?? wath ist this?

[chrisild]

The BBR (Bundesamt für Bauwesen und Raumordnung, Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning) is the office that organizes the coin design competitions. See here: http://www.bbr.bund.de/cln_005/nn_21264/DE/WettbewerbeAusschreibungen/Muenzwettbewerbe/muenzwettbewerbe__node.html

(Edit) The BBR website only has older/archived design competitions now. Currently the contests are done by the BADV (Bundesamt für zentrale Dienste und offene Vermögensfragen), see http://www.badv.bund.de/003_menue_links/f1_Muenze/Wettbewerbe/index.html

Christian

[annovi.frizio]

thank you very much...   

[Figleaf]

From Christian's link:

In case of a two-stage contest, 30 artists are invited to participate. In the first stage, a drawn design is required. The jury selects 10 participants rom these drawings to participate in te second rond, in which a plaster model five times enlarged is expected of these participants. In the second and final session of the jury the winner, who is entrusted with transforming the design into a coin, is chosen.

In case of a single stage contest, 15 artists are invited to participate. They are charged with submitting deigns for both sides in white hard plaster.

The criteria for the judgement of the work submitted are:

Contest content: design idea/theme; artistic quality, harmony between the two sides
Contest form: timely submission, completeness of documentation, fulfilling technical requirements, first rond test

The procedure is anonymous.
The language of the contest is German.

Peter

[RabensteinK]

The British Royal Mint, despite having its own designers, has run several public design contests that appeared to be fairly open to all comers.

The 1997 £2 coin generic design (the UK's first bimetallic coin) was won by a Norfolk art teacher, Bruce Ruskin, who came up with 4 concentric circles illustrating technological progress from the stone age (an abstract motif) via the industrial revolution (lots of cogwheels) and the computer (a circuit board pattern) to the internet (communication nodes around the rim). It didn't find much public favour since you had to have it explained to you before you could see it in the coin ...

In 2008 Matthew Dent, a freelance graphics designer, won the competition to modernise all sub-pound coins; his design dissolved the Royal Shield into fragments, with each different pence coin showing different parts in close-up. As an afterthought, the pound was also redesigned by him to show the actual shield from which the fragments came (the public was again left guessing what it was all supposed to mean), and there were protests that the historical shield fails to include any Welsh element - true, but Matthew said it didn't bother him as a Welshman ...

In 2009, the large series of Olympiad special 50p coins was subject to a public competition, too.

Currently the £1 is being redesigned as it is far too often counterfeited (3.4 percent of the 1.5 billion pound coins in general circulation are fakes). This time the treasury has decided to revert to the 12-sided design of the old pre-decimal threepence but use a bimetallic design incorporating the latest security features. The competition is open to anyone, with a closing date of 30th October. There will be 2 rounds - the first round designs will be invited to submit plaster casts (with £1,000 preliminary prize money if you do your own, or £250 if they do it for you). The winner's reward is £10,000. The design is scheduled to be introduced into circulation in 2017, in between the introduction of the new Churchill £5 note and Jane Austen £10 note. Of course we might well have a King by then ... but I'm sure the Mint has a back-up design for that.

[Figleaf]

Welcome, Rabenstein and thank you for your thoughtful contribution.

You will find the others mints also invite outside domestic artists to submit designs. However, the key words are invite and domestic. Our member Frizio Annovi is Italian. He makes perfectly good designs and has scored at least once for an African coin, but it is rare that he is allowed even to participate in a design contest. Like other European mints, the UK royal mint has regularly employed foreigners in the past (the Roettiers and Pistrucci come to mind immediately), but since the dawn of nationalism, one has to have the right passport to be considered, with few exceptions (I seem to remember a Dutch commemorative designed by an established British artist), except in a neo-colonialist way.

I would argue that the WTO rules on government procurement would prohibit such behaviour in the first place. Even if they don't, EU rules and jurisprudence on non-discrimation by nationality certainly seem strong enough, but are apparently not implemented in the field of coin design. Even tiny Andorra could get away with restricting participation to Andorrans. How many qualified coin designers are there in Andorra? Hint: one of the runners-up was an enthusiastic member of the Andorran government. Surely, this old-fashioned nationalistic behaviour is not just short-sighted, but also results in lesser quality designs.

Peter

[RabensteinK]

Couldn't agree more - maybe it needs a very public court case before hidden bias of this type is eliminated ... However for what's worth, the published rules do specifically say that the competition is open to all nationalities, and that only the automatically and consecutively assigned entry numbers will be used to identify entrants.

For what it's worth, I am also an admirer of Frizio - his work is awesome. Good luck to him. Another example of a successful cross-border artist is Wojciech Pietranik from Poland who emigrated to Australia and worked very successfully for the Australian Mint - but I guess he probably took Australian citizenship.

[augsburger]

The Royal Mint had a limit on who could design for the Olympics, but I don't know how seriously they took it. One guy was Taiwanese or something, they did say "resident", I was, at the time of design and entry, living in Austria, but I am British and was only in Austria for 8 months, and for some unknown reasons was in the UK when we have to go to the mint, but the Taiwanese guy wasn't.

It'd be interesting to see if there's a difference in designs for this one pound coin design. Maybe they get a lot of stuff that they think just lacks understanding, I don't know. A topic of Britishness for this design competition is extremely hard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbols_of_the_United_Kingdom,_the_Channel_Islands_and_the_Isle_of_Man

A great example here, national flowers, well England and Scotland have one, Wales and Northern Ireland have two. National animals, Northern Ireland doesn't have one. Coat of Arms, Northern Ireland doesn't have one. Motto, Northern Ireland doesn't have one. Anthems, England doesn't have one. Flags, Northern Ireland doesn't really have one, the one it uses internationally for sports and things like that is a flag that officially went out of service, and has protestant connotations, which is a massive problem.
Traditional dress, England doesn't have a traditional dress, there are some that exist still but they're not really promoted.

Also, the Royal Coat of Arms neglects Wales, and has England twice with the three lions, also it has a lion (England) and a unicorn (Scotland) holding the arms, but no Northern Ireland and no Wales. And the UK flag doesn't have welsh representation.

Any design has to try and get all four countries represented in a clear way.

Being a foreigner and not understanding this stuff, it could be immense. (I'm not saying this is a reason to stop them).

However it's also possible that a foreigner might have a better idea of what is British than a British person who is stuck in the mire that is all of this stuff. (maybe a tea cup with English muffins or something)

[chrisild]

There are quite a few different ways of coming to a coin design, of course.   Some mints have, as I wrote before, employed designers and will not (or hardly ever) consider third party submissions. Others have a "pool" or database of artists and invite some designers to submit designs. Others are "wide open" and will accept designs from anybody but will do any communication in the official language of the country. On important occasions, even the combination of an open contest and a public vote is possible ...

Frankly, I could not tell what "the" best approach is. In my opinion, a mix would make sense: Employed or "pool" mint designers, and from time to time start an open competition. The latter would hopefully open new perspectives and may also raise awareness in the general public.

Christian

[RabensteinK]

There's an interesting page on the Royal Mint website giving some background info on the 2008 competition:

http://www.royalmint.com/discover/decimalisation/refreshing-decimal-coins

Interesting that they received 4,000 entries from 500 people, i.e. on average 8 per entrant ...

The current competition commenced on 12th September and has had almost 8,000 downloads (= potential entries) of the official entry form so far - given that it'll finish by 30th October and assuming the rate of downloads remains similar there will be around 16,000 potential entries. If even half of those actually end up as submissions it'll be a hell of a screening job for the jury!

[augsburger]

Yeah, though I'd have thought that anyone who is going to design must be doing so by now.

So far I have about 40 potential designs, haha (well a lot of them of tweaks of other designs, about 5 types of design), so if 8,000 had say 50 or 60 designs each, that's well, A LOT of designs. Though I'm assuming professionals will do less designs and spend more time on them and not issue the same design with a few tweaks. However I am getting better at using computer tools so that I'm happier with some of the designs.

Maybe when I get told I haven't won I'll post some of the better designs (some aren't very good I'm afraid) on here.

For the Olympics I must have submitted about 40 designs or so too.

However, I do bet that people think they have to download a new template for each design, instead of one template for each person. So someone may have downloaded 60 of them for themselves. Say la vee! As the french say, innit?