Obama Campaign Posters Win Top Prize in U.K. Design Competition

By Farah Nayeri

March 19 (Bloomberg) -- The “Hope” series of Barack Obama campaign posters, used in the runup to his election as U.S. president in November, was voted the design of the year in a U.K. competition.

Created by the artist Shepard Fairey, the posters beat 90 runners-up in the Brit Insurance Design of the Year 2009 contest organized by London’s Design Museum.

The panel judges said in an e-mailed release today that the poster “breathed new life into a form that had lost its purpose,” and that it “came not from a marketing campaign, but as a self-initiated fundraising campaign.”

Fairey, the poster’s designer, is being sued by the Associated Press over claims that the stylized image copied an AP photograph. The complaint was filed earlier this month in federal court in New York.
Awards were also given out in individual categories. The fashion winner was Italian Vogue’s “Black Issue,” dated July 2008, which pictured four black models on the cover and was devoted exclusively to successful black women.

The other winners, with categories in parentheses, were:
- the New Oslo Opera House in Norway, designed by Snohetta (architecture);
- the Myto chair, seamless engineered-plastics seating designed by Konstantin Grcic and commissioned by BASF AG, the world’s biggest chemical producer (furniture);
- Make Magazine, the first U.S. publication to focus on home kits to make technology projects, meaning those put together in “backyards, basements, and garages” (interactive);
- Magno Wooden Radio, made of local, sustainable materials in an Indonesian village and designed by Singgih S. Kartono (product);
- Line-J Medellin Metro Cable in Colombia, cable cars designed by France’s Poma and used to transport people living in the hills to the city (transport).

To contact the reporter on this story: Farah Nayeri in London at Farahn@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: March 19, 2009 05:55 EDT